Page 24 of The Women at Ocean's End

‘He’s fine. Improving.’ Or at least he was still alive, still hanging on; it was as much as the vet had promised for now.

‘Well, that’s something, I suppose.’ He looked towards his jeep meaningfully and she thought perhaps he was wondering if she wanted another lift back to the cottage.

‘Mustn’t keep you,’ she said, swinging beneath his arm, as he continued to hold the door open.

‘Are you sure you’re…’ He nodded towards the jeep, perhaps expecting her to come out loaded down with a week’s worth of shopping.

‘No, no, I’m in a bit of a rush actually,’ she said and she nodded towards old Mrs O’Brien, who was idling around the chocolate display at the register.

‘Is that fella bothering you?’ Mrs O’Brien asked moments later when she’d picked up a carton of milk and chocolate she definitely didn’t need from the display.

‘Ah, no, he’s…’ Ros knew, as an outsider, it was better to pick your words carefully about the other islanders. From what she could tell, most of them were either related to each other or had been friends for years. You couldn’t say a word without danger of putting your foot in it.

‘Well, between me and you now,’ the old lady leaned forwards, lowering her voice, ‘I’d givehima wide berth.’ Then she put up her hands as if stopping Ros saying a word. ‘No, no, I know, he’s easy on the eye, I was young myself once, I remember what it was like to see a man with a good pair of shoulders and eyes you could swim in, but there’s been a bit of talk about him doing the rounds, recently.’

Easy on the eye?Ros felt she would rather drink curdled milk than admit to anyone she found Jonah Ashe attractive at this point.

‘No, no, I wasn’t…’ Ros tried to get a word in, but Mrs O’Brien could be deaf when it suited and was known to enjoy a juicy nugget of gossip.

‘He was married, see?’

‘Well that’s not exactly…’

‘Oh, I know, it’s modern times and even the visiting rector is onto his second wife, but here’s the thing. Jonah Ashe married one of those lovely Lucas girls from Ballycove, you must know them; their mother owns the dress shop. Lovely girls, the eldest of them was a model at some point. All very glamorous, tall and elegant and tanned as walnuts the lot of them, all married well.’

She halted then, as if she’d just stepped down from a lovely dream. ‘That is, they all married well, except the poor girl that married that ne’er-do-good. Too easy on the eye, that’s hisproblem, and of course, when they are that good-looking, there’ll always be temptations.’

‘So, he met someone else?’

‘From what I’ve heard, she was working away as a nurse, came home after a night shift and found him in their marital bed with some floozy. No-one in the village could understand what on earth he was thinking, when he had such a lovely girl…’

‘Well, who knows how people think.’ Ros placed her change on the counter, then pushed it closer to the old shopkeeper, who seemed to have clear forgotten that she was meant to be taking payment for the carton of milk and the bar of chocolate she’d just rung up on the register.

‘You be wise now, don’t go falling for him. He’s over here, running old Johnny Ashe’s land as if it was his life’s calling, when everyone here knows he’s only running away from all the trouble he made back on the mainland.’

‘Huh, they might say the same about me,’ Ros said under her breath, because even if she hadn’t left behind a wronged spouse, she certainly had escaped to Pin Hill Island and maybe she, too, was hiding from reality.

Eventually, she managed to pay for her groceries and walked back to the cottage deep in thought. Her head was somehow filled with the information Mrs O’Brien had passed along, and wouldn’t make room for anything else. It felt as if that uneven feeling she’d had about Jonah Ashe made more sense now. After all, what sort of man moved to a place like this and contented himself with falling into the life so recently vacated by his recently deceased bachelor uncle? Yes, Ros decided, she’d definitely be giving him a wide berth from here on, if she could manage it.

*

It seemed to take an eternity from the closing date of applications for the Parks and Wildlife human resources department to come back to her. The email arrived just as she was sitting down to lunch in the cottage. It pinged through loudly on her phone.

‘Oh my God, OH MY GOD!’ She called Constance immediately. ‘I can’t believe it. I have an interview.’ And as soon as she had said it, that crumbling feeling began to grind away at her insides – of course she got an interview, she’d basically lied on the application form. She hadn’t mentioned Wild Bird Ireland or the dreadful damage she’d been responsible for there.

‘Why wouldn’t you have an interview! I told you, they’d be mad not to give you the job with bells on.’ Constance said as if there had never been any question about it.

‘Oh, my…’ The enormity of it suddenly hit Ros.

‘What? What is it?’

‘It’s just…’ She couldn’t put it into words, she could hardly think of it without wincing. ‘I suppose, it’s just nerves, there’s so much riding on this one interview.’ And that was true too, because she so desperately wanted to stay on the island, in spite of the fact that, deep down, she really didn’t feel as if she deserved to.

‘It’s not the great political debate of the century. I’m sure they’ll just ask about what’s on your CV and maybe…’ Constance raised a finger, as if plucking thoughts from the air. ‘Where you see yourself in ten years? Isn’t that one they always ask?’ she settled on. Then she said, ‘Of course, you can ask your best friend Google, he hasn’t put you wrong yet.’

‘There’s a big difference between learning to bottle-feed a kid goat and actually being able to blow your own trumpet when you’re nervous as hell.’ Ros was grateful for the seemingly unlimited faith that Constance had in her.

‘I’m sure there’s no difference at all worth talking about and you won’t be nervous, you just have to be yourself and they will love you,’ Constance said with more confidence than Ros felt.

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