With families chatting in the seats around me, a young girl knitting across the aisle, I gripped the arm rests.
I’m not a good sailor, so as I stared out at a flat calm sea, I went through a version of the same ritual I do when I’m on a plane: I figured that if I never took my eyes off what was beneath me and ahead of me, that would make it safe.
I texted the builder boyfriend, a keen yachtsman, to say I did not understand how anyone could go on a cruise. All that sea for miles. What was there to look at?
I drove in a dream alongside my own land, looking to the right of me thinking: ‘All this!’
To my utter astonishment, a circle appeared in the water just beneath my window and a head popped out. Somehow, I was seeing a dolphin by accident. The creature performed a joyful turn in the air and disappeared under the water. I sat back and decided everything was going to be all right.
The sun began setting as Ireland appeared on the horizon and the family sitting nearest to me became restive when the steward instructed foot passengers to wait. The little boy and his sister began jostling over a seat, she asking ‘Where am I gonna sit?’ and he, no more than five years old, proclaiming: ‘You can sit on your rrrrrrrr…’ The mother shushed him. I was laughing so much, I forgot to disembark. By the time I realised all the drivers were off, I was running down the ramp to find my Peugeot on its own in the hold.
From the port it was motorway almost all the way down. But in the pitch black the last hour was country lanes to where my new house was looming on a hillside. Somewhere, the builder b was waiting for me.
The weather broke and the storm I had prayed to avoid on the sea began to rage with a vengeance as I wound my way in the dark, completely disorientated, following the sat nav. I realised I hadn’t had a chance to refill the tank. The petrol gauge was on red.
I drove and drove in the driving rain, feeling like I would be lost for ever, rounding bend after bend, giving way to ever smaller and narrower roads. I passed a closed filling station with half an hour to go, and started to wonder what I thought I was doing.
With the needle at the very bottom, I made it to the village, then swerved for the lane with grass down the middle that leads to the house I viewed once, then bought.
I passed the wrought-iron main gate, chained shut now the horses are the other side. I drove in a dream alongside my own land, looking to the right of me thinking: ‘All this!’
It takes first gear to get a car up the last bit of road, which becomes almost vertical as it winds to the top gate into the farm yard.
The builder b was standing in the rain waiting for me, spaniels at his side. The big Georgian house was overwhelming in the dark. I wandered from room to room in a daze, thinking how impossible it seemed as he showed me the kitchen heated by the Aga, the fire burning in the grate of a formal living room with its tall elegant windows, through which an improbably bright moon shone.
Just beyond that window the horses were grazing. It was too much to take in. I collapsed exhausted into a strange bed, then got lost in the maze of rooms trying to find the one bathroom that’s functioning.
In the morning, when I crawled out of bed, I looked through the window bleary-eyed to see Darcy in her outdoor rug grazing happily with a pony in the emerald green field in front of the house, the BB’s two black and white cobs in the paddock to the left.
‘It all starts to make sense now, doesn’t it?’ said the builder b, coming up behind me.
We wandered around the house and yard in our dressing gowns, the BB pointing to the outbuilding that would make a B&B annex, the cattle barn already bedded with straw for the winter months.
When the removal lorry turned up it was chaos. I stole away from the endless boxes to drive to the nearest town to get provisions, and to open a bank account. ‘Email me any time,’ said the lady in the bank. ‘Really?’ I said, turning her card over in my hand.
On the way back, the rain stopped and a shaft of sun hit the mountain. It glowed golden on top, russet red further down.
They say it rains here a lot. But it’s sun and rain, sun and rain, sun and rain. The drama and the peace of it is beautiful.
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