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…as being so pleasant and kind to everyone, which she undoubtedly is, but Colin strikes people as being very caustic, straitlaced and, of course, extremely bigoted. Bigotry boils in the Patterson family blood. I know you have never liked Colin, and Liam never cared for his Uncle Jim, but I’ve got to know him quite well since he and Janet started going out together, and he’s not at all as bad as he is painted. He can be very droll when he gets going. I think a lot of his bigotry is just to annoy certain people. I don’t think he’s as malicious as his reputation makes him out to be. He’s very good to Janet, and that’s the important thing. Another source of gossip is that he is fifteen years older than she is. Janet doesn’t seem to mind. The other day she said to me, ‘I look at how happy you and Liam are in your little house with your baby son, and I’m not at all worried. After all, there is a bigger difference in your ages than in ours.’ Oh Joe, if only she knew how miserable I am. I once swore to myself never to write to you about my troubles or my unhappiness, but ‘the truth will out’ no matter what we do to try to cover it. Joe, I’m longing to see you again. I live only for the short, precious hours that we are allowed to share.
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Joe did not come home again until the following May when the weather was hot and dry, when wildflowers speckled the hedgerow banks, and hawthorns decked themselves in white, and all along the coast of Drumard, from Tranaliskeen to Ardross, the whins exploded in flaring sunbursts of pure gold.
‘I’d almost forgotten how colourful and clean and beautiful the world can be,’ Joe said.
He stood at the scullery window and gazed out across the cornfields and the grey stone walls to where the sea glimmered and sparkled like a silver sheet of tinsel and sequins. He bent down, dipped a tin mug into a white enamelled bucket of clear water and drank deeply. ‘Coming home here in the bus was such an eye-opener. Made me realise how much I’ve been missing these past three years.’
He re-entered the kitchen where Nora sat in front of the open grate of the cooking range. She was darning a blue, woollen sock. On the rug at her feet the baby Owen Joe played with a brightly painted, wooden model car that Joe had brought home as a gift.
‘I got that at Dearborn near Detroit,’ he had said. ‘That’s where Henry Ford started making his cars.’
‘It’s a very appropriate name for a place to buy a gift for a baby,’ Nora had remarked.
Libros Libertad 