Heartstones (15 page)

Chapter Fourteen

Phoebe snuggled down between piles of blankets, pulled up the faded patchwork quilt, and gazed around the cosy room. She felt cocooned within its whitewashed walls, outside the waves were crashing on the beach and the rain was beating against the window pane. Inside all was warm and quiet.

She could see the big mirror at the top of the stairs; half the room seemed to be reflected in its mottled glass, creating the illusion of more space than there actually was. She had tucked the postcard of William Flynn’s painting into its thick mahogany frame for lack of any way of sticking it onto the wall.

Her rucksack leant against the armchair – there hadn’t been room to put any of her things into the chest of drawers, and anyway she felt reluctant to remove her grandmother’s clothes. She had sifted through them as Katrina had made up the bed, holding up brightly patterned scarves and beaded skirts.

‘She was hippy?’ Katrina had asked as she battled with a fitted sheet on the irregular-sized mattress.

Phoebe tried to remember her grandmother more clearly. ‘Just a bit alternative,’ said Phoebe. ‘Creative with her clothes.’

‘Like you, Phoebe,’

‘No, I’m just scruffy,’ laughed Phoebe. ‘Anna Brennan had real style.’ She stood up and started taking a few things from her rucksack: her sketchbook and pencils,
Jane Eyre
, her grandmother’s pot and the crumpled school tea towel. She put the little green pot on top of the chest of drawers. ‘Welcome home,’ she whispered. Then she put the tea towel beside it, smoothing it with her hands in an attempt to flatten it out. Katrina came to stand beside her. She touched the tea towel.

‘Is nice idea,’ she said. ‘They did that for money-raising at the school here. It was Rory O’Brian who is organising it; the children did a very funny picture of his hair.’

‘This is supposed to be David.’ Phoebe pointed at the grinning face.

Katrina peered at it closely, ‘Very handsome,’ she said, and they both laughed.

‘You have photograph?’ Katrina asked. ‘Of your husband?’

Phoebe’s heart sunk, she couldn’t possibly show her the picture that had been screwed up by Nola. How could she explain the state of it?

ʻNo, I havenʼt got any photographs.ʼ

‘Even no photographs of your wedding day? Nothing to have memories at all?’

Phoebe shook her head. ‘They have been lost.’

‘How?’

Phoebe pursed her lips and thought for a few seconds. ‘In a fire.’ She paused. ‘At our house. Just after David died.’

Katrina’s hand flew to her mouth, ‘You have dead husband and a fire! Is tragic!’

Phoebe couldn’t look at Katrina; the blatant lie had made her stomach twist with shame. She closed her eyes and turned away. Suddenly she was being pulled backwards and found herself in Katrina’s warm embrace once more. Katrina stroked her hair. ‘You poor, poor thing. Do not weep; we will look after you now in Carraigmore.’

Afterwards they went back to Fibber’s for beef stew and an easy shift behind the bar in an almost empty pub. Mrs Flannigan’s ‘head’ had her confined to her bed again but despite being short-staffed Fibber had encouraged Phoebe to leave early, ‘Katrina and I will just have to cope if there’s a mad influx after
CSI
.’

Driving down the sandy lane in the dark, Phoebe felt excited about the first night in her new home. Like a child with a new den, she couldn’t wait to try it out, to see how it felt to actually live there.

Lying in bed she opened the first page of
Jane Eyre
and tried to read but she couldn’t concentrate, couldn’t help stopping to look around the room. She gave up and put the book down. She was about to turn off the lamp when she noticed a single slim drawer in the table beside the bed. From her prostrate position Phoebe pulled the drawer open and slid her hand inside. Her fingers felt an assortment of unseen objects. Curious, she pushed herself up on to one elbow and started to rummage through the contents – an odd collection of those bits and pieces that tend to accumulate in small drawers whether they have any use or not – a tortoiseshell comb, an ancient jar of congealed hand cream, several broken pencils, a Nigerian coin, two brown bottles of pills, a single silver earring, glass beads on a broken string, the condensed amber dregs of a bottle of Chanel and, at the bottom, a greetings card – a picture of a vase of tulips. Inside a child’s neatly looping hand had written
Happy Birthday Granny, with love from Nola and Mum and Dad xxxx
and underneath that, in wobbly writing,
Phoebe
and a picture of a little girl and a heart.

Phoebe sat up, pulled the drawer right out, and put it on her lap. She looked down at it for a long time. The objects were so evocative that she felt as close to her grandmother as if she had simply been downstairs.

She was about to put the drawer back when she noticed something else – a small stone, slatey grey, almost black, with a line of bright quartz crystals running through its centre like a lightning flash. Picking up the stone Phoebe closed her eyes, fingering its smooth surface. She remembered blissful afternoons with her grandmother on the beach. Looking for stones had been their special thing – just Phoebe and her grandmother, not her parents, not Nola; just the little girl and the old woman wandering the beach, scanning the pebbly high-tide line, sporadically bending down, studying, discarding, occasionally keeping. They were discerning; they weren’t looking for just any stones, they didn’t want round ones or long ones or craggy ones; they wanted heart stones.

Phoebe opened her eyes and looked at the stone in her palm again. They would have been very pleased with this one; it really was an almost perfect heart. The quartz crystals glistened in the electric light. Phoebe felt sure that she had never seen it before; surely she would have remembered, surely her grandmother would have let her keep it and Phoebe would have strung it up with the others that had eventually hung from the window in her flat so many years later. It would probably have been in pride of place, at the top.

She put the drawer back but not the stone. Slipping out of bed she searched through the diaries that she’d tidied into a pile on the windowsill earlier on. Finding the one she wanted she climbed back into bed and, with the stone nestling in her hand, she began to read.

December 5th

We are to host a supper party. Gordon has arranged it for next Saturday evening. We will be ten at the table; The Reverend Watkins and Mrs Watkins, Mr Delaney the schoolteacher and his drippy wife, their daughter Nancy and Mrs Delaney’s second cousin’s son who’s come to teach the top class in the school, and Mr Nuttall the solicitor and his wife who I have never met.

Gordon thinks some company might be good for me. I can’t say I am looking forward to it; I’m sure it will be deadly dull compared to the great gatherings Mother used to hold at the Castle.

I don’t feel much like socialising, with the auction for the Castle being next week; I can hardly bear to think of what will happen to my home. Della tells me it is the talk of Carraigmore, with a rumour circulating that it is to be bought by a businessman from Dublin who wants to turn it into a hotel, another has it that a builder wants to pull it down to build bungalows, and yesterday she came home from the shop and said that Mrs O’Leary told her that a Hollywood film star wants to buy it.

All I know is that I have a knot in my heart and a pain deep down, so deep I can’t even place it; I so miss its beautiful rooms and the gardens and the view – and what will happen to the boathouse?

December 8th

Gordon has gone to Dublin for a meeting of the Royal Academy of Medicine. He will stay the night so at least I don’t have to struggle to join in with his awkward conversation over dinner, though sometimes I find myself quite interested when he talks about his medical cases. He seems to have a passion for his work. He told me last night that he used to have a practice in Howth. I wanted to ask why he left to come somewhere as small and quiet as Carraigmore but his dogs broke into the room like a gang of hoodlums; Gordon left the table to put them outside and he never returned to finish his meal.

Mother sent a postcard today. It had a picture of a Scottish piper on the front. She and Aunt Margaret are in Edinburgh staying at the North British. She writes that she has seen a lovely Norman Hartnell evening coat in Vogue that will be just the thing for Christmas – she wants to ask Aunt Margaret’s dressmaker to copy it when they get back to Cheltenham. At the bottom, after her name, she adds that she hopes I have settled into married life.

December 9th

Gordon has returned with a new dress for me from Brown Thomas’s – russet satin with a low waist and shapeless skirt, I look like an elderly matron wearing a sack. I had to ask Della to help me do up all the tiny buttons on the back. As I stood looking in the mirror making faces of disgust she told me she had never seen anyone look so lovely who wasn’t in a film – I think she was just saying that to make me feel better.

Gordon is very pleased with the way the ghastly dress looks and says I am to wear it on Saturday for the supper party.

December 10th

I asked Mrs Smythe if she wanted me to go through the menu for tomorrow night’s dinner with her – this is what Mother used to do with Mrs Reilly. Mrs Smythe informed me that she had consulted Dr Brennan and he was perfectly happy with her choice of leg of lamb and suet pudding, and then she left the room without starting the fire in the drawing room that I had asked for. Over lunch Gordon told me that I do not need to bother with matters of housekeeping and catering, Mrs Smythe is perfectly capable. Well, what am I to do in this gloomy house? I am sure I will die from boredom. But at least I have Razzle to take for walks and Della comes up to my room most evenings after supper– she lies across my bed and begs me to read out the gossip from the
Picturegoer
magazine. Sometimes I wonder if she’s able to read herself. I cannot understand how she holds down the job at Mrs O’Leary’s; I’m sure she’s only employed for her pretty face and the way her full figure shows off the clothes. I miss her when she’s at work.

December 11th

I am lying on my bed still wearing the horrendous dress as I can’t undo the buttons by myself. I don’t want to ask Della to help because to speak to someone else might break the spell Iʼve fallen under tonight.

The supper party started well enough with sherry and polite conversation in the drawing room. Mrs Watkins and Mrs Delaney were on their very best behaviour, perched like plump parakeets on the edges of their chairs, complaining about tea rationing while the men stood by the fire talking about the problems of the inter-party government. Mr Nuttall’s wife turned out to be a beautiful woman with eyes like a cat and a dress that Mother would have adored; she made me feel even dowdier than I did already. Nancy Delaney sat beside me on the sofa wearing navy crepe and a sullen expression.

Gordon was very attentive, asking after my welfare, filling up my glass with more sherry than I really wanted. I felt awkward and too much aware that I was the object of everybody’s furtive looks. I found it impossible to join in the conversation and I longed to escape.

The new teacher arrived late, just as we were sitting down to eat. There was confusion over where he was to sit and in the end he sat in Gordon’s chair beside me and Gordon had to sit by Nancy. We were too many for the dining table so that everyone was squeezed together with hardly enough room to move our arms, I felt too embarrassed to look at my new neighbour and I studied the willow pattern on my plate and hoped he wouldn’t be expecting scintillating conversation. After a few moments of silence he surprised me by quietly asking if my dog still had a red muzzle. I turned to look at him and the whole room seemed to shift as though I’d just stepped off a carousel. It was him, the man from the beach, the man from whom Razzle had stolen the crayon. My thoughts seemed to come to a grinding halt and once more I couldn’t think of anything to say. I was relieved when Della served us with our chicken soup though my throat seemed to have seized up and I found it hard to swallow.

All through the soup and then the lamb I couldn’t speak. Mr Nuttall was on my other side but I couldn’t even find the words to answer his strained attempts at conversation.

As Della served the suet pudding Nancy Delaney, enlivened by sherry and claret, suddenly started to tell us about her trip to the cinema to see the latest Moira Shearer film; this set Mrs Delaney off on a tirade about the evils of going to the pictures and the ill effect it was having on the moral conduct of Ireland. Apparently watching films will lead to fornication on an unheard of scale. She had obviously had too much to drink and I think the Reverend Watkins must have thought he was relieving the situation when he changed the subject to talk about the sale of the Castle. On and on he and Mr Nuttall droned about the likelihood of it being sold to a developer, then Mrs Nuttall mentioned the hotel and Mr Nuttall said he hoped there would be a golf course and Mr Delaney said that that would be a splendid thing for Carraigmore, and then Mr Nuttall said it was an old pile that should be pulled down and there were murmurs of agreement from the others. I felt as though the whole table were enjoying speculating on the destruction of my precious home, my paradise. I must have looked upset because the man from the beach inclined his head towards mine.

‘Do you miss it very much?’ he said it quietly, his handsome face just inches from my own.

I nodded and moved to pick up my water glass, but as I did so I knocked the wine goblet and sent it crashing to the floor, glass and claret everywhere.

Complete silence. The whole room stopped speaking and looked at me. I leant down to try and pick up the pieces at my feet but Mrs Smythe rushed in and made a grand show of clearing it up until Gordon asked her to leave it until later. ‘That’s the Persian rug ruined,’ she muttered under her breath as she left the room. I clenched my napkin between my hands in an agony of embarrassment. Then underneath the table I felt a hand gently taking hold of mine.

‘It’s all right,’ he said, so quiet I almost thought I had imagined it until he said it again. ‘It’s all right.’ I didn’t look at him and I knew he wasn’t looking at me and that no one would know that beneath the white damask and the dark mahogany my hand was being held by a beautiful man. And then Mrs Watkins suggested that the ladies retire to the drawing room and the man let go of my hand, and I got to my feet and I didn’t see him again until he was being helped into his heavy overcoat by Della and was thanking Gordon for a very pleasant evening. Gordon said, ‘Thank you for coming, Michael,’ and for a brief second Michael met my eye, and then he followed the Delaneys out of the door and left me standing on the hall tiles with the certainty that nothing will ever be the same again.