It Was Only Ever You Read Free Page A

shoes and laid them carefully on the mossy wood, then sat down on the edge of the jetty and dipped her toes in the water. She let out a shiver. ‘It’s cold as ice!’ she squealed, then said, ‘I’m not as adventurous as you.’
    He swam towards her, making long broad strokes with his arms, trying to impress her. He trod water in front of her, his breath heavy with the cold. He could feel every inch of his naked body tingling, the chill of the water fighting the heat of his nakedness. Rays of sun bounced off his skin and looking down at his arms he saw how tanned he had become. With his long narrow face, broad nose and coarse curls, Patrick was told he was the most handsome boy in the town. He didn’t care much about that, but he also knew when he fixed his vivid blue eyes on something, be it girl or bull, what effect they had.
    He fixed them on Rose now and said, ‘You’re as adventurous as any man, I’m thinking.’
    ‘What makes you say that?’
    Patrick’s limbs were getting tired and he suddenly regretted his spontaneous urge to strip naked.
    ‘Facing down a big bull, there’s not every man would do that.’
    He felt stupid having a conversation, with her fully dressed in the warm sunlight and him naked in the freezing lake. What had he been thinking of?
    Then Rose did something entirely unexpected. She closed her eyes, pointed her toes and slid herself, fully dressed, into the water with the smoothness of a raw egg sliding down the edge of a cold plate. Before her head went under, Patrick heard her say in a clear voice, yet not much louder than a whisper, ‘Save me. I can’t swim.’
    *
    Rose didn’t know why she did such a reckless, stupid thing. It was the same passionate impulse that had led her to take the back route down to the lake, after she had seen Patrick Murphy and his friends taking the road in that direction with their swim bags. Her parents had gone down to Galway for the day and she had stayed behind in the house on her own.
    Her mother had wanted her to go with them. She was quite insistent but Rose had said she would prefer to stay at home and sketch. Eleanor Hopkins had no reason not to trust her daughter. Rose was a quiet, studious young woman who, aside from a friendship with young Sinead Murphy stretching back to their first years in school together, spent most of her time drawing and sketching, for which she had some considerable talent. There had been talk of sending her up to Dublin to art school, when the time came. But the idea of that made Eleanor uncomfortable. Rose had grown into a beauty and Eleanor knew all about the great responsibility beauty could bring and the terrible pitfalls that came with male flattery. Including a backstreet abortion in a filthy room above a shop in Dublin’s seamy streets, which had robbed a demure young girl of her capacity to have children. It was a dark secret that, as a medical man, her husband suspected, but never referred to. Rose was adopted from a convent shortly before the Cork doctor moved his practice and family to this Mayo town. Rose did not know she was adopted and her parents never discussed it, even between themselves. Although their daughter’s astonishing beauty was a constant reminder of her provenance, they kept it a secret from her. It was their shame, not hers.
    Eleanor loved Rose even more than if she had given birth to her from her own broken womb. Now she was determined to keep her daughter away from boys for as long as she could.
    Perhaps, then, it was a rebellion against her mother’s anxiety and persistent cloistering that had caused Rose to chase Patrick Murphy and his friends down to the lake that day. The very moment her mother’s back was turned she had faced off a bull and then slid into a lake in the hope that a young man would save her from drowning.
    Rose felt the freezing water creep through the roots of her long thick hair as the ends floated up to the surface then, as she sank, tangled about her face in a