Free Shade by Neil Jordan Page A

it gone. But her wish had no effect: the indistinct half-globe stared down at her as if teasing her with its continued presence. She wished the curtains would close of their own accord, blocking out the moon, but of course the curtains stayed, limp and inanimate. She thought of Miss Shawcross’s definition of her doll, inanimate, lifeless, ceramic and horsehair. For a moment she wished Hester gone, then instantly regretted it; but Hester remained, sleeping on the crook of her arm, in her Puritan bib and smock.
    And then the light darkened imperceptibly on Hester’s ceramic cheeks and Nina looked back at the window and the moon was gone, behind a thin strip of cloud shaped like an orange-peel. For an unending moment she was filled with a bottomless terror and wished the moon back again. And the moon indeed came back, as the cloud changed its shape from an orange-peel to a wisp of hair, exposing the half-finished globe once more. And although she knew the moon exposed itself independent of her wishes, she was still not certain that her wishes had no effect. If her wish cohered with what inevitably would happen, did her wish not in some way conspire with what would happen? If she had not wished, would what had happened have slipped into the realm of that which would not happen? And if, having glimpsed a vision of Miss Shawcross’s hair under water, mingling with the seaweed, she had warned Miss Shawcross of the imminent dangers of water, would Miss Shawcross have still ended thus, under the limp seaweed in the waters of the Boyne? Or would she have dismissed Nina’s inner world as adroitly as she dismissed that of her doll, now named Hester?
    If she had wished, then, that George had not taken the course he did, would she rather than I be standing now by the upper window, observing, since observation is all I am, the lone policeman’s breath on the cold air, his stamping feet on the hoar-frosted grass by the gates? Had she been at the left-hand window in the dining room on the first storey, could she have transferred her gaze to the pale light spilling in through the right-hand window, from a moon very like the one she wished away, spilling its light over the frozen fields? And since we are supposing here, as she loved to suppose, could she have seen the mauve fleur-de-lys of the wallpaper print of forty-five years ago, could she have followed that pattern to the door? Could she have walked to the accompaniment of distant piano music from downstairs, towards that door?
    Time would be malleable for her in her world of supposition, so the formidable oak stairway would still be intact, the steps would even creak as she mounted them. The door to her bedroom would still be open, so she could enter, silent as the grave, and observe her young self sleeping at last, under the oatmeal-coloured blanket, the doll with its Puritan bib and smock on the pillow beside her. She could watch her own chest rise and fall, her bowed mouth half open, she could bend close and feel the warmth of her breath. She could wonder at her loneliness, her utter isolation, the kind of isolation that animates the inanimate Hester, that brings others, perhaps even me, into being. She could cease these suppositions then and look once more out of the window, see below her, instead of a policeman stamping his feet, blowing his cold fingers, wondering about the fact of murder, hares dancing in the moonlit fields between the haystacks.

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    N INA’S MOTHER, IN the third year of the new century, came to acknowledge her imaginative world for what it was—loneliness. Perhaps because she herself was growing familiar with that condition. The days stretched out ahead of her like infinite extensions of the crossword puzzles she filled-in, drab, endless and somehow more real than she had ever expected them to be. Her husband returned home at six, then often left again at seven, to oversee the night shippings. Everything that was new to him, it seemed, was old to her, in