Undelivered Glory

The opening: fraught with menace. A man and his wife and infant daughter are staying in a rented house over the sea in a small Irish town where they are guests for a family wedding. The mood is tense. Wind blows doors shut. The house, the largest in the village, has been commandeered as an informal gathering place for the other guests, who thus intrude on the narrator, a novelist hoping to get some writing done. Eventually, in search of a distraction, the novelist and his wife go for a walk — she with their daughter strapped to her chest. They are accompanied by his wife’s cousin, with whom he has never gotten along but whom he can’t find a plausible excuse for ditching. They have a destination — a path along the cliffs — but are uncertain of the way and cannot (in these pre-Starlink days) get reception on their phones. They make their way through brambles and switchbacks, down toward the waves. Eventually, they turn back. But the day, without incident, is not without threat: “The strange colors and curious odors in this vector of time,” the narrator tells us, “I would often revisit to cross out, defang, dismember, making it ghastly so I couldn’t pretend to miss it after I lost them both: but of course I did.”