Book Excerpt: This Other Eden By Paul Harding

This Other Eden by Paul Harding

Published by Penguin Random House U.K.

Bridget Carney had an afternoon alone to herself so she spent it in the library. Mr. Hale had left for Concord that morning and once she finished cleaning up after breakfast she was free. A spring storm blew across the yard beyond the high windows. The trees at the borders bowed in the gusts of wind and straightened in the pauses and rain swept in sheets across the greening grass. Water poured from the corners of the roof and braided and tailed away from the windows and seemed to be drawn spinning back up into the sky then dashed back against the house and sounded like buckets of nails tossed against the shingles and glass. The white sky filled the room with a bright silvery-white gray light and Bridget did not light any lamps. She sat in one of the deep upholstered chairs arranged in front of the dark fireplace and listened soundless and still to spring blustering and whisking up new flowers and greening the grass, blowing across the open mouth of the chimney three floors above, and sounding wide hoarse intermittent notes through the firebox she imagined was a song of promise and upheaval played by the presiding spirits of April— the same spirits, she thought, as she thought of her mother and father, as those that tumbled and crashed over her cottage back home, just beyond the southwestern tip of the Dingle Peninsula in Ireland, on Great Blasket Island.

The winds calmed at intervals and the room descended and settled into deep silence, deeper than no sound, into deeper denser depths of the season, and stray, fat dollops of rain spattered singly or in pairs or quartets in sequence against the wet wood or wet glass, against the perfect silence of the stilled outside air. The silence sharpened the bright silvery-white gray light and the light sharpened the colors in the room and the outlines of the gold mirrored clock on the wall and the black and white etchings of the tulips and anemones and their black frames, and the black and white rubbings of the knights in their armor from the Italian gravestones, and the red and black and brown spines of the books on the shelves, and the gold lettering embossed into them, and the leather on the chairs, and the upholstery on the couch and the wooden tables and brass and porcelain and pewter lamps on them, and the livid crimson of the Persian rug and the mossy green and gray-blue flowers and rust-colored vines woven across it. Overnight, the storm would almost surely make sleeping uncertain for her, the noise and roaring in the dark unsettling, and she’d possibly even end up provoked, tired, grouchy the next morning when she came to the kitchen, and after she ate her toast the racket with the crockery and china would make her want to complain out loud although no one would be there to hear her, the only other person in the house old Mr. Hale, Thomas Hale, up in his rooms, looking out the windows or at a copy of Milton or Ovid. But for the hour, nothing could have quieted her more, hushed her heart, soothed her into perfect melancholy peace more than the mild violent rejuvenating tigers of spring charging the length and breadth of Enon. 

That night she slept deeply and without interruption. The fitfulness she had worried about during the afternoon never came to pass and as soon as she closed her eyes she dropped like a diver in a bell into the depths of sleep. She woke the next morning with no recollection of having dreamed, but she did have a sense of recently having been traveling with thrilling speed, and underwater, she realized, as well, of perhaps being shuttled to waking clinging to the knobbed back of a torpedoing whale, perhaps returning her from a secret visit back to her home, where she’d stood on the dark familiar beach and looked at the dim silhouette of her cottage on the slope, sorrowful, but comforted knowing her parents were asleep inside, perhaps themselves dreaming of her standing on the beach in the dark, asking her, Why have you come home, Bridget? 

Why have you come back to us from the water?