This is where I live now; my travelling has brought me here and it is good enough. My daughter-in-law tries – forcefully some days, gently others – to move me up to the spare bedroom in the cottage, but right here does me fine. It is only a shed but it is cosy like a gypsy caravan I owned once; it smells of clay and insects and the windows are cobwebbed. There is the smell of oil paint, turpentine and linseed too, and clean east Atlantic air hovers over everything.

I enjoy community – the buzz and thrash of family and neighbourhood life – but solitary space suits me the most. Here in my shed I am free to dream, to paint and to unguard my face and body. Today I am painting an apology to my son. Last week I made one comment too many about my lack of grandchildren.

‘Do you want to know why you have no grandkids, Mam?’ John said. ‘Do you really want to know?’ He paced around my shed, making dust dance in lightbeams. ‘Maggie and I are incompatible. That’s what the doctors say: “incompatible.” It’s a disaster. So stop asking me about it.’

‘You could have told me before,’ I said, ‘talked to me.’

‘For what? So you could quiz me about it at every step?’ John raked one hand through his hair. ‘You haven’t a clue, Mam; you don’t know what we’ve been going through.’

I could have contradicted him on that but he started to cry, so for the first time in twenty years I took my son in my arms and rocked him.

Now I am saying sorry to him in the best way I can. I am doing a painting of an orchid for John.

‘The flower must express the life lived,’ my old teacher always said.

The life lived. I have lived my life in ten different ways and I am still not sure if I’ve found the best way; the way to make me say ‘Yes, this is it.’

Earlier today I went to the florist in Ballytrasna and explored the dark cave of the shop until the right orchid for my painting presented itself. I found one with olive-green stains that leaked onto white petals and it was perfect.

My painting doesn’t look like any work I’ve done before; the orchid is surreal with a tall building for a stamen and oceanic petals. I use my oil pastels, paletting them on like butter, building up layers of texture that make the orchid and the building and the watery petals come alive. Then I take up my brush to add finer strokes.

John is not my husband’s son and he doesn’t know this. I have never found a way to tell him. The painting will say it but he won’t understand that. The stamen-building represents the place he was conceived in Dublin – a tall seaside hotel. I had gifted myself a trip to the galleries in that city and came home with more than I went there with. It is a lifetime ago. A life-lived ago.

I am cursed with an unchristian figure – men have ogled me since I was twelve. That they still do gives me a silly satisfaction. John’s father, though, was not an ogler; he was too self-possessed a man for that. He had the artist’s temperament; he was the sort of man who loved women – appreciated all about them – but would never give himself to just one. Not out of malice but because of a gentleness in his loving that left him helpless when someone new came along. I know that makes him sound like any ordinary womaniser but, really, he was a decent man. John resembles him in that.

We met in the National Gallery and our affair drifted over listless years. I don’t think my husband knew about my affair but, in the end, I finished it. My marriage was satisfying and John’s father didn’t try to sweep me out of it, so I stayed. My husband brought John up as ours; I’ll never know if he knew. About any of it.

A daytime moon like a circular cloud hangs over the cottage; I step back from my easel, right up to the window to look at it and I see my daughter-in-law in the garden. Her head is tilted to the sky and I leave my shed and the orchid painting to go to her. We both stand, looking up.

‘Beautiful, isn’t it?’ I say. She turns to me and I’m shocked to see a bruise under her eye. My hand flies to touch it. ‘Maggie?’ I say.

‘It’s not what you think, Verona.’

‘What do I think?’

‘That John hit me,’ she says.

‘Did he?’

Maggie looks away, back up at the moon. ‘It is beautiful,’ she says. She sighs. ‘Verona, John and I have decided to go our separate ways. For a while. Just to see.’

Like an opal that holds too much water, my heart cracks; pain pushes through my chest, against my lungs, and I want more than anything to be alone to cry.

‘I’m so sorry, Maggie.’

She takes my hand and squeezes it and walks back towards the cottage.

+

The painting is growing properly – it gathers itself to itself almost, it seems, without my help. I stand and add colours but I am at a remove. The picture is luminous: milky whites blend with greens, blues and greys; the whole effect of it pleases me, a feeling I am not used to. The hotel near Dublin Bay, where I made love to a man I was not married to, looks just like I remember it: a glassy beacon reaching for the sky. The orchid’s water-petals are vibrant. As my brush dips to the palette then finds the canvas, my thoughts coast from John’s father to my husband. He too was a good and decent man.

My husband and I tried for many years to have a baby; when John came he was a miracle. My husband welcomed this wonder-child with different knowledge to mine, but we shared a great love for him. Our son. The baby we thought we could never have.

I was wrong to deceive my husband; the guilt of keeping my secret is the thing that has warped my life’s path and made me a drifter, I am sure of it. My life lived. My life half-lived. I am always stopping and starting, forever veering and moving on. I think I should tell John, tell him properly, straight to his face. Maybe it would clarify things for him and Maggie.

John comes down to my shed; he has his overcoat on and a backpack in his hand.

‘You’re leaving,’ I say.

‘I have to, Mam. Only for a while. Maggie and I are making each other sad.’

‘I made this for you.’ I toss one hand towards the easel where the painting sits.

John looks at it for a moment and smiles. ‘It’s lovely,’ he says. ‘Keep it for me, Mam.’

‘Look at it properly, John. Please. Look into it. There’s a message for you there.’

John walks across the floor of the shed and squints at the picture. ‘It’s unusual. Different to your normal style; the orchid is beautiful. I like it. Yes, I like it a lot.’

‘Do you understand it, John?’ I say, feeling half-frantic that I might tell him the truth, even worse because I know I can’t. Or won’t.

‘My train leaves in ten minutes; I have to go.’ He lunges forward and hugs me.

‘I’m sorry, son,’ I say. ‘He was a good man, your father. A great man.’

‘I know that, Mam,’ John says. ‘Mind the painting for me, I’ll be back soon.’

I watch him leave, his father’s long stride taking him across the garden, under the cloud-moon, down towards Ballytrasna and the train station that sits beside the east Atlantic sea. I send my blessings after him and place my secret back inside myself, where it belongs.

+ + +

Born in Dublin in 1970, Nuala Ní Chonchúir is a full-time fiction writer and poet, living in Galway county. She has published three collections of short fiction (Nude, To The World of Men, Welcome, and The Wind Across the Grass), three poetry collections (Portrait of the Artist With a Red Car, Tattoo: Tatú, and Molly’s Daughter in the DIVAS! New Irish Women’s Writing Anthology), and the novel YOU. Nuala holds a BA in Irish from Trinity College Dublin and a Masters in Translation Studies (Irish/English) from Dublin City University. She has worked as an arts administrator in theatre and in a writers’ centre; as a translator, as a bookseller and also in a university library. Nuala teaches creative writing on a part-time basis.