descent into the valley. She didn’t find it hard to picture her slip-sliding down a glacier.
“Old age is a curse, Eve darling,” her grandmother said, changing tack again. “Almost everyone is gone now. And you’ve only the company of younger people, who get impatient when you can’t do things,” she added.
Eve started to protest.
“Don’t try and tell me otherwise. It’s true,” she said. “But then I’d be impatient with me right now. Blasted fall.”
“You’ve had a life larger than many, Grams,” said Eve. “And you’ll get better again, even the doctor said you were a living marvel.”
Her grandmother scoffed at this last remark.
“Lucy Ambrose,” her grandmother blurted out. As she slipped from one anecdote to another, Eve could tell that her grams’s memories were becoming jumbled. She would do her best to make sense of them later. “One of the best. We used to climb together whenever we could. She became one of the country’s finest climbers. For a while we were known as the ‘housewife explorers,’ which of course ticked us off no end.”
“What happened to her?”
“Died on the descent from Sasso delle Dieci in the Val Badia. The Dolomites. 1981. She was forty-eight.”
“Oh gosh. How did you cope with that? Did it make you think twice about continuing to climb?”
“Climbers die all the time, Eve; it’s one of the risks you take every time you make an ascent. And I was no stranger to death by then. I thought of those I’d lost every time I stepped on a mountain, they walked beside me, never left me.”
“Oh, Grams.” Eve immediately thought of her own mother, of the times that she imagined her close by even though she was no longer alive. “Did it help you cope when . . . well, when Mum died?”
The old woman rested her head against the back of the sofa. “Not really. Losing a child, no matter how old they—or you—are is different. Far, far worse. Always heartbreaking.”
“Like losing your mother,” said Eve quietly.
“Yes, my dear, as bad as losing your mother.”
Eve squeezed her grandmother’s hand, feeling the fine bones beneath the thin skin. “We’re lucky we’ve got each other, hey?” she said, swallowing the lump in her throat.
“For now, darling,” her grams sighed. “Then all you’re left with at the end are the memories. Good and bad. But you’ve got to go out and make them, no matter what risks there might be.”
Eve didn’t feel as if she were making any particularly exciting memories, not at the moment anyway.
“Oh, I know you’re stuck here with me, watching the days pass by—” Eve went to object. “And I do appreciate it, Eve; I really do. I know what you’ve given up, to take care of me.”
“If you mean David, I’m not certain it was ever going to be a long-term thing anyway,” Eve admitted.
“There’s plenty of time for love in your life and when you meet the right person, you’ll know in an instant—but promise me that as soon as I’m well again you’ll go and have adventures, make use of that degree of yours—one of my great regrets is that I wasted mine. And then come back and tell an old lady all about it.”
“Of course, Grams,” Eve reassured her. “Though I haven’t a clue what I might do with myself actually.”
“Something will come along, you’ll see.”
They sat for a moment in easy silence.
“Did you know?” Eve asked, thinking again of David. “That you’d met the right person? Right away?”
“I’m afraid I did,” her grams said and Eve heard an unmistakable sadness in her voice. “But by then it was far too late.”
Chapter Ten
St. Mary’s, Spring 2018
She’s seen better days, but she’s seaworthy enough. I had the boys down at the boatshed check her over. They gave her a clean bill of health.” Janice patted the hull of the aluminum runabout affectionately.
It was the next morning, and they had arranged to meet down at the quay, near the Mermaid, at low tide.
Rachel looked dubiously at the small craft. White paint flaked from its sides and the name on one side was almost worn away. The Soleil d’Or. “Golden Sun,” said Janice, seeing her looking at it. “It’s a type of flower that grows on the islands, a narcissi. The season’s almost over—it’s much earlier here than on the mainland—but you’ll see a few rogue late bloomers if you look carefully.”
Rachel rolled the boat from one side to the other and as far as she could tell there were no obvious weak spots.