Cathy Kelly 3-book Bundle (96 page)

‘You had a walk at lunchtime,’ Nora said, hugging them both. ‘
And
this morning. You are shameless.’

She pulled on a cardigan and her duffel coat.

Nora didn’t bother much with fashion. Flat shoes, comfortable trousers and shirts worn untucked was her style. She varied the colours and the fabric, but generally, she looked the same no matter what. The hair that had gone grey in her twenties, like her mother’s, was tied back or sometimes plaited. She wore suncream in summer, moisturiser in winter, and clear salve instead of lip gloss. When Megan and Pippa had stayed with her as teenagers, they’d moaned that she had no cosmetics for them to practise on.

Bien dans sa peau
, as Pippa would say now. Comfortable in her skin.

Pippa understood it, but poor Megan still didn’t. Megan worked in a world where the emphasis on the outside was so total and all-consuming that there wasn’t any time for the inside. When Megan had first said she wanted to go to acting school, Nora had got an anxious feeling in the pit of her stomach. She didn’t approve of acting or actresses. Of course, they were all ‘actors’ now, men and women. Another bit of tomfoolery. It wasn’t a steady trade. Only a few lucky ones made a living out of it, and the rest struggled endlessly, hoping for a break. Nora had known that Megan’s head would be turned by that glittery surface world, and she’d been right.

The dogs’ excited barking made her hurry to open the door and as they walked out into the dark she admired, as she often did, the beauty of the lights all around the square.
Golden Square’s residents could be split into two groups: the people who owned whole houses, had two cars, and employed someone else to cut their grass, and those whose families had lived there for donkeys’ years and who couldn’t have afforded to buy one now even with the state of the market, but who were holding on for the next property boom. They cut their own grass, occasionally rented out bits of the houses to tenants, and looked enviously at their neighbours’ double glazing.

Nora was one of the latter type. Her parents had inherited the house and had moved in anxiously in the 1940s, fresh from a tiny flat above a gentlemen’s draper’s shop in Camden Street, terrified they’d never be able to heat or redecorate this comparatively enormous residence.

They’d been so proud of their new home, but always anxious about living somewhere so grand. As if they didn’t really belong.

Nobody’s windows were so clean or their garden so weedfree as the Flynns’. It was as if they felt keeping the place spotless made up for the fact that they had to repaint it all themselves. It was years before they could afford to have a roofer fix the tiles. When it rained heavily, Nora’s mother used to trail round the house nervously, waiting for the arrival of the next spot of damp. Unaccustomed to the whole notion of a garden, they’d kept the lawn shorn and attempted little else.

One of the biggest worries had been the behaviour of the various basement tenants over the years. Nora could remember her mother’s prayers that the next lot of new people would be quiet.

‘I’ll say a novena to St Jude,’ she’d say. Sometimes the novenas worked and sometimes they didn’t. Nora’s parents never wondered why, they just accepted it. God’s choice was not theirs to question.

If they could see her now, Nora thought sadly. They’d have
told her to keep the dogs on the lead and her father would have been following at a crouch, plastic bag in hand, waiting for the inevitable poop.

Dogs were supposed to be kept on the lead in the square, but it was easy enough to work out which animals were there and whether it was safe to let her pair off. It was safe this evening. Nora unclipped the leads and let the dogs race off under the gentle lamplight. She sat down on her favourite bench, stretched out her legs and let the strains of the day slough off her. There were only a couple of other people about. Nora liked all the doggie people in the square. Having dogs did something to people. Made them softer, gentler.

Prudence Maguire didn’t have a dog; no surprise there. Rumour had it that her daughter had once had a hamster, but it had escaped, and Prudence had refused permission to have the couch ripped apart to find it. Nora imagined a ghostly hamster still rattling round inside the Maguire family couch, making little eldritch squeaks of distress that Prudence would totally ignore.

She glanced at her watch. Ten to seven. Megan would have landed. She’d be in the taxi soon, on her way. Nora closed her eyes and wished for the first time ever that her niece wasn’t coming. Nora had tried hard to be a steadying influence in her nieces’ lives. Her brother Fionn would have wanted his big sister to take care of his daughters when he died. But it hadn’t been easy. Marguerite, their mother, was the exact opposite of Nora: a woman who lived in a state of constant, almost child-like happiness, she was prone to both wild adventures and falling passionately in love.

She was the type who clearly needed a man around and, although she’d adored Fionn, he wasn’t long dead before she was anxiously looking for another strong male to take care of her.

She also had strange views on how to bring up her daughters.

When the carrots the children had planted hadn’t grown in Nora’s bit of garden, Marguerite stuck shop-bought ones into the earth instead and pretended to dig them up.

‘That’s appalling,’ Nora had said, unable to stop herself. ‘How can they learn about real life when you fake it for them like that?’

‘They’re only a few carrots,’ Marguerite had laughed. ‘Don’t be so serious, Nora.’

And now Marguerite was sunning herself in Ibiza with her latest hunk and didn’t appear to be treating Megan’s situation as worrying.

‘Darling, it’ll all blow over,’ Marguerite had reportedly said to Pippa when her elder daughter had phoned with the news.

Nora hadn’t spoken to Marguerite in years. It wasn’t possible to kill someone over the phone but Nora didn’t want to take any chances.

So Nora was left to pick up the pieces. But how could she? Megan still didn’t know that huge, clean carrots didn’t magically appear a couple of weeks after you planted seeds.

The cassette player in the taxi had been blasting out Moroccan music all the way from the airport and the driver, a very slender, dark-skinned man with long, artistic fingers that tapped the steering wheel in time to the beat, hadn’t spoken at all since Megan had got into the cab.

‘Very good,’ was all he’d said when she gave him the address.

‘This is it,’ she said, sitting forward in the seat at the taxi slowed down in Golden Square.

‘Very good,’ he said again, applying the brakes with a firm foot.

Megan shot forward in the back seat and banged her head on the headrest of the passenger seat. The taxi driver looked around in alarm.

‘It’s fine,’ Megan said quickly, holding a hand up in the international ‘all fine’ gesture.

He still looked alarmed.

‘Really fine,’ she said. ‘I’m OK, honestly.’

She handed him the money plus a generous tip. When you didn’t want to communicate, Megan had learned it was best to hand out big tips. It was like saying, ‘I’m not a rude bitch because I’m famous, really, but here’s a large tip, just to make sure you like me.’

‘Very good,’ the driver said.

It was clearly the only English he spoke. Poor man. He wasn’t at home here either, she thought, hauling her stuff out and shivering in the chilly night air.

Megan couldn’t actually remember the first time she and Pippa had come to stay with Nora. Their aunt and her narrow, quirky house in Golden Square had always been a part of their lives, it seemed. Yet she knew it wasn’t always so. It was only when Dad died that they’d begun to stay with their aunt for long periods of time. It was clear, though nobody had ever said as much, that Mum hadn’t coped well with her husband’s death, hence Nora had stepped in to take care of her little nieces.

Golden Square, with its endless cycle of interesting tenants downstairs, and various motley dogs, cats and even once, a parakeet, had filled the gap left by Megan’s father. Yet everyone appeared to forget that it was Nora’s brother who’d died. She had every right to be as devastated as Mum, yet she never said anything about her own grief. She’d simply moved into their lives, being there when she was needed, for summer holidays, for Christmases, her pain on hold while she did her duty.

Nora must have been watching out for Megan now because the front door opened and Nora appeared silhouetted in the hall light, trying to restrain two barking dogs.

‘Hello,’ called Megan, hauling her wheeled hold-all along the narrow garden path. The taxi driver had barely accelerated off with a roar of tyres, before the tears started rolling down her cheeks.

Nora gave up holding back Cici and Leonardo, opened the door wide and welcomed Megan into her arms, the dogs jumping eagerly around them.

‘You’re here now,’ Nora said softly. ‘It’ll be all right, Meg, you’ll see.’

Hearing the diminutive name she’d preferred when she was a kid made Megan feel even sadder. She’d had such plans for her life and what had they come to? ‘Oh, Nora, everything’s a disaster. I’ve ruined it all,’ she said.

‘Nonsense,’ Nora replied, deciding that now wasn’t the time for the lecture. She pulled the hold-all the rest of the way inside, called the dogs in and shut the front door. ‘You made a mistake, people do. You feel terrible right now, but you will feel better soon.’

Despite her tears, Megan felt familiar anger prick. Nora still talked to her as though she were a child. This was the destruction of both her life and her career, not a schoolgirl escapade. She was twenty-six, not a kid.

‘Come on upstairs. I’ve just made myself some lemon and chamomile tea, there’s plenty in the pot for two. And
Bondi Vet
is on later. They’re all repeats; tonight it’s the one about the parrot on Prozac, you’ll love it.’

Nora adored animal shows, everything from wild animals being secretly filmed in the bush to domestic cats being rescued from mad people who didn’t feed them: she watched them all.

Megan thought of how she’d hoped that tonight she could talk to someone who loved her and would understand. Perhaps she could finally unburden herself and tell Nora everything. But no, they were going to watch animal programmes. Still, it was better than having Nora lecture her.

‘Great,’ she said, with an enthusiasm she didn’t feel. What she’d really like was a cool glass of white wine and a hot bath, but neither seemed to be on the menu.

The dogs split the loving between them, with Cici appointing herself carer of Megan and sitting on her lap waiting to be adored. Leonardo, shaking with the excitement of the evening, lay on the couch beside Nora, his velvety grey head on her knee.

Nobody could resist a double bill of
Bondi Vet
and with Cici there to hug, Nora could see her niece visibly relax. Megan kicked off her shoes and folded her feet up under her on the big armchair, rearranging Cici so she was snuggled close to her. Pretending to watch the television, Nora secretly watched Megan.

Her beauty had come as a surprise. Marguerite was pretty in a blonde, girlish way, and Pippa took after her. Fionn himself had been tall, attractive and had an air of great strength about him, but he was no matinee idol. And yet along had come Megan, a genuine beauty even when she was a child. There had been no teenage anxieties for her about her looks, no acne or teeth problems, nothing. She’d grown from a slight fairy of a child with cool blonde hair and enquiring dark olive green eyes into a slight fairy of a woman, with a sheen to her skin, an inner glow that marked her out. People had stared at her when Nora took the two girls out; nobody had ever assumed Nora was their mother, which might have been hurtful except that Nora had no problems with her own lack of beauty. It was like the length of your legs: there was nothing whatsoever to do about it.

It had been no surprise that film and television people had been enamoured of Megan. Even as a child playing a little gangster in a stage version of
Bugsy Malone
, she was luminous.

But not so luminous now, Nora thought. Megan was wearing what all young women seemed to wear these days:
those loose, boyish jeans, flat little lace-up runners and an enormous grey sweatshirt that dwarfed her. Her skin had a greyish tinge, she looked skinny and, without any make-up, the ultra-blonde hair looked cheap and, Nora hated to even think it, tarty.

Nora had read the single interview given by someone close to Katharine Hartnell in a newspaper a client had left at the surgery. Devoid of most of the usual celebrity cover-up, it had sounded heartfelt and terribly sad. There was no blithe dismissal of a lowly actress trying to infiltrate a solid movie-star marriage. Just the assertion that this had split the Hartnells up and that her husband’s betrayal had shaken Katharine to the core.

No, Nora decided. She wouldn’t say anything to Megan tonight. What could she say, anyway? She wasn’t equipped to counsel Megan over this. It was so far outside Nora’s comfort zone that she wouldn’t have known where to start.

But she felt, as her eyes stared unseeing at the Sydney vets trying to save a dog bitten by a snake, that she’d let her brother down. This wasn’t what he would have wanted for one of his beloved daughters.

You need good-quality flour to make decent bread. Never underestimate a nice cake of soda bread with freshly churned butter for when you’re tired and ready to sink down beside your own fire. Or a good wholemeal to set off a piece of cheese when you need energy.

It took me a long time to learn how to make good bread because my mother never measured a thing. She just threw handfuls in. Flour, some buttermilk left over from churning…I have my recipe here and I can tell you, we got more out of the flour than just bread. We got linen sheets!

I never thought we were poor, you see, Eleanor. We had exactly what everyone else in Kilmoney had, which was next to nothing. But that wasn’t poor. There was this little old creature who lived in a tumbledown shack on the coast road, and we all thought she was poor. You’d see her at Mass on a Sunday with her dress inside out and not much of a dress, either. She was as thin as a consumptive and hadn’t a tooth in her head. Lord help us, that was our vision of poverty. We always had food to eat from our garden, the hens, the ducks and the cows, and as long as someone had the
loan of a donkey to go to the bog, we’d turf for the fire. Your aunt Agnes could turn her hand to anything, and she kept us neat.

Agnes learned about nice belongings when she went into service. Captain and Mrs Fitzmaurice she worked for, and nobody could say a word against them in her hearing.

Linen sheets, she said, were the last word in luxury.

Sure we have linen sheets, my father said. And we did. The eight-stone bags that the flour came in were made of a coarse linen and when the flour was emptied into the flour barrel, Mam would unpick the bags, wash them, bleach them in the sun out in the fields, and then sew them up into sheets.

Mam had been taught to knit the thread the bags were sewn with into lace. When she got sick, I took over.

I used to think, if the likes of Mrs Fitzmaurice had to live in a small three-bedroomed cottage like us, now that would be hard for a person used to fine linen. But for us, we loved it. It was home. The Captain and Mrs Fitzmaurice never had children. She was always so interested in you, Eleanor, when you were a child, that I think she’d have liked a little one or two. So you see, I never understood us being poor. In my eyes, we had everything.

On a cold Wednesday evening in January, Rae Kerrigan stood on her tiny balcony overlooking Golden Square, and watched a girl with long dark hair walk along the east side of the square. The girl might have been twenty and with her hair and a long striped scarf trailing behind her, she reminded Rae of herself when she was young. The girl walked with the energy and determination of youth, long jean-clad legs striding along, carrying what looked like a huge rucksack easily. Rae
had once had a similar scarf, and had been as slender, racing along with her dark hair flying.

Men probably loved the girl’s hair. Men had certainly loved Rae’s.

‘You look like Ali MacGraw in
Love Story.
Never cut your hair,’ one boyfriend had begged her, after a long night at a folk concert on the campus in Galway, when they were still drinking wine in her tiny bedsit at dawn. The modern Rae was able to smile ruefully at the memory. That was well over thirty-five years ago, at least, she realised.

The boyfriend would have been shocked if he saw that the long dark hair was now tawny and shoulder-length, streaked with hairdresser’s clever soft browns to hide the grey that had appeared when she’d hit forty. But her winged brows were still mahogany dark, flared over the deep-set warm eyes that contributed to Rae’s thoughtful, penetrating gaze.

Still, that boyfriend would have changed too over the years; he probably bore as much resemblance to the earnest young philosophy student with floppy brown curls as she did to the girl she’d once been. She’d be fifty-eight on her next birthday and her life had taken paths she could never have imagined back then.

Along the way, she’d got married, had her beloved son Anton, and she’d traded her career in human resources for something a little different. Despite what she’d thought all those years ago, everything had worked out. Well, nearly everything.

She’d once read a spiritual saying that encapsulated her early life: for your heart to open, it first has to break. Rae’s heart had certainly been broken, but she’d recovered, more or less.

The girl who’d prompted the memories reached the corner and was gone from sight. Rae hoped, for the girl’s sake, that she’d had an easier life than Rae had by the same age. She wouldn’t wish that on anyone.

She took a sip of her steaming tea. The sun was low in the sky and the light shone through the two sycamore trees outside the balcony, creating a soft acid green light on the front of her house. She loved to get a little fresh air in the evening. Just for a moment in the cooler weather, and longer in summer. Her favourite place was sitting on the tiny first-storey balcony on her narrow white house, with Golden Square spread beneath her, music coming from the open French doors behind her and a cup of tea in her hand.

The balcony was too small for any actual furniture. In fact, it wasn’t really a balcony, just a ledge off the master bedroom. But it was a glorious place to lean against the iron railings and think about the day.

Evening was muted. As if people’s voices were less harsh, cars moved more slowly along the streets and even the dogs barked in a more lazy manner. The closing down of the day, time to relax. Certain times of day should be bottled, she decided. A late afternoon like this one would be very therapeutic: in times of stress, take two sips of Quiet January Twilight, a drop of New Year’s Eve Excitement, and a large spoonful of Winter Dawn.

Pity it wasn’t that easy.

They were lucky, living in Golden Square. The houses surrounding the gardens were mainly beautiful old redbricks, with narrow three-storeys like Will and Rae’s, a couple of cottages and a line of 1930s villas thrown in, with one apartment block.

On one side of the square there was a swathe of local shops including a proper butcher’s and The Nook, which sold everything from aspirin to apples. There was a dry cleaner’s, a small restaurant that changed hands every year like clockwork, and the Old Claddagh Bar, the local pub, which still did a roaring trade in processed cheese sandwiches on factory sliced white bread.

Every year, the latest owners of the restaurant walked into
the Old Claddagh, sniffed at the sight of the sandwiches and the tomato-shaped plastic ketchup container, and walked out happily, convinced that the local pub wasn’t much competition. They’d bring ciabatta and miso soup to the area, they thought, and nobody would go near the pub for lunch ever again. By the end of the year they’d be leaving with their tails between their legs as it transpired the locals liked processed cheese sandwiches with their pints at lunchtime and found ciabatta bread very hard and dry.

Nestled between The Nook convenience store and the Old Claddagh Bar was the only other eatery to have survived the restaurant curse of Golden Square: Titania’s Palace Tearooms, which Rae had managed for the past fifteen years. She could see it from her little balcony: a double-windowed shop painted a rich olive green with the name in cursive lettering in gold over the shop, and an old-fashioned cast-iron sign sticking out over the door: Titania’s Palace Tearooms.

The tearooms were still going strong, as Rae and Timothy, the owner, had long ago realised that keeping it simple and cosy worked. People could go into Titania’s Palace and sit quietly reading the day’s newspapers with nobody talking to them, if they wished, or they could enjoy warm company. They could eat cupcakes smothered in pink icing or low-cal bran muffins. Rae’s management theory was that once a customer experienced the welcome of Titania’s Palace they wouldn’t be able to resist coming again.

Rae loved the tearooms.

‘It’s peaceful,’ she told Will.

‘It’s noisy as hell when I go in there,’ he teased her gently.

‘But it’s nice noise, enjoyable noise,’ she pointed out.

And it was. The noise was of people enjoying themselves, talking, chattering, laughing, waving hello to so and so, all in the comforting atmosphere of the place. Her son Anton liked to say there was an invisible forcefield around the
place, and once you entered, you were stuck in Kindland.

‘You have got to stop watching so much
Star Trek
,’ his father joked. ‘You’ll be learning Klingon next.’

On the drive of the house beside Rae’s, she could see her neighbour, Claire, coming in with a bag of shopping. Claire was wearing her pink velvet coat with the fluffy fake fur collar. She’d been wearing that coat for twenty years now. Rae could remember when Claire had acquired it. The coat had created quite a scandal among some members of the residents’ association, especially Prudence Maguire, who was hideously jealous of Claire’s bleached-blonde glamour and ease with her own sexuality.

Ironically, it was Prudence – who’d loudly prophesied juvenile delinquency and immoral lapses in everyone else – who was practically estranged from her family. Claire and Evan’s kids had grown into kind, caring people who appeared to have achieved happy lives. When Claire’s daughter, Rachel, turned up in the square with her family, car windows open and music blaring, the children piled out, laughing and giggling, dying to see their grandparents.

Rae’s eyrie and the sanctuary of the tearoom window meant she could see Prudence’s house a lot of the time. No laughing carloads of grandchildren ever pulled up there. Rae pitied her neighbour, even if she didn’t like her very much.

Prudence reminded Rae a little of her own mother-in-law, Geraldine Kerrigan. They were both judgemental and determined to see the negative side in any situation. The only difference was that Rae didn’t have to spend time with Prudence but Geraldine was coming for lunch on Sunday. Rae normally loved the slowness of Sunday, but not when Geraldine was coming, an event which happened with increasing regularity as Geraldine grew older.

And nothing, nothing would be done the way Geraldine liked it. The table would be too fussily decorated or else Geraldine might remark that Rae must have been too busy to set
things properly. The roast would be overdone or too bloody in the centre. The vegetables would be wrong for a person with such a sensitive stomach, or else carrot puree was suitable only for people with no teeth, surely?

Still, Geraldine had done one wonderful thing in her life, which was giving birth to Rae’s husband Will. Meeting Will had been one of the blessings of Rae’s life: her son, Anton, had been the other one. He was grown up now, in London working full time for the political magazine he’d gone to on a placement during his politics degree. Sometimes the old white house seemed empty without him, with no head stuck in the fridge roaring, ‘What can I eat, Mum?’ and no noisy footsteps running up and down the stairs at odd hours, yelling, ‘I’ll call when I want to be collected.’

His absence had partly been filled by Rae doing more volunteer work for Community Cares, a local charity that some people described as the second social welfare system. They helped people when there was nobody else, offering financial aid and friendship.

Her tea was nearly cold now. She’d spent too long standing on the balcony thinking. Rae finished it off, went inside her bedroom and closed the balcony doors tightly. She loved their bedroom. It was like a warm cocoon, with wallpaper the colour of honey, a quilted yellow silk eiderdown and old gold picture frames on the walls with black-and-white photos of their family over the years. On Rae’s side of the bed were piles of books waiting to be read: on Will’s side was a photo of Rae and his single book – he didn’t read in the same crazy, haphazard way she did, with three books on the go at all times.

Each time she looked at this lovely warm room, Rae thought how lucky she was. Unlike most people, she got to see just how lucky she was every single day.

When people asked her why she worked as a volunteer for Community Cares along with running the tearooms, she rarely replied truthfully. Rae knew that the people who asked in
such astonishment wouldn’t have understood the true answer.

‘But why? Why would you want to go into horrible council flats like Delaney and see all those drug addicts?’

‘It’s rewarding,’ she would say simply and change the conversation. She’d long ago learned that it was impossible to change people’s firmly set views on poverty and deprivation. Geraldine, her mother-in-law, was one such person. In all the time Rae had been working for Community Cares, Geraldine had never once said a nice thing about either the work or the people being helped.

‘I suppose somebody has to do it,’ was as much as she could bring herself to say.

Geraldine prided herself on her family’s standing in society. Being involved with the dregs of society didn’t make the slightest sense to her. Surely people would want to distance themselves from poverty?

To the other sort of people who asked Rae why she worked with the charity – the ones who seemed to understand and who recognised that it could be hard to be exposed to other people’s pain every day – Rae told half the truth:

‘Helping people gives me peace.’

She didn’t say that she’d had first-hand experience of the strife that came from poverty and deprivation. Though Rae had been married to Will Kerrigan for twenty-five years and had lived in the comfort of Golden Square all that time, in her mind’s eye, she was only a few steps away from the Hennessey girl who had grown up in a run-down bungalow on the outskirts of Limerick city.

Ironically, she didn’t remember Community Cares coming to her household to help, but then, her parents would probably have yelled at the volunteers and called them ‘dogooders!’ They were touchy about anyone they thought might be looking down on them.

Set up in the 1930s to help the poor, over the decades Community Cares had grown to a country-wide organisation
with branches in every town. It wasn’t religious, just humanist. Nobody was ever turned away.

Rae and her CC partner, Dulcie, normally made calls on Tuesday evenings and Wednesday afternoons, like today. Theirs was a perfect working relationship as Dulcie was different from Rae in every way that mattered. Dulcie was seventy and had worked with the charity for over twenty years. Small, grey-haired, with bright, inquisitive eyes and an addiction to nail art, she had seen everything life could throw at a person. She was also great fun.