Homecoming (19 page)

‘People like their small treats,’ said Timothy with relief. He owned a building company as well and that was in dire straits.

Rae felt sorry for Timothy. A gentle, balding, middle-aged man who lived in one of the biggest houses in Golden Square, he’d had a hard life despite the material things he owned, like a top-of-the-range Mercedes and a holiday home in Florida. The source of the difficulties were definitely his wife, Sheree, who never appeared to be happy with anything. She didn’t approve of Titania’s, although Timothy had bought it with a view to her running it.

Thankfully, Sheree’s desire not to sully her hands with work had turned out to be to Rae’s benefit.

‘You do a great job, Rae,’ Timothy went on. ‘With you here, this place just runs itself.’

Rae nodded, although it wasn’t quite that easy. She ran the place with a team of loyal women workers, nearly all of whom had children and looked out for each other.

When Anton had been small, Rae had organised rotas to ensure that everyone was accommodated.

If Livvy’s little girl was running a temperature, Rae got someone else in early to do the baking, and when Sonja had needed extra time off because her newborn baby had been diagnosed with reflux, Rae had kept the job open and given part-time work to her next-door neighbour Claire’s eldest daughter, who was going to college and wanted a few hours’ work every week.

Today, there was a rota of ten local women working in Titania’s, with one man, Pavel, a patisserie chef who’d once worked in the finest restaurant in Warsaw and who now made magical cakes for the inhabitants of Golden Square. Rae could quite happily go away for a week knowing that Titania’s was in the best of hands.

Friendliness, cleanliness, beautiful food and a great welcome were the watchwords of Titania’s.

This morning, Patsy from the hairdressing salon was in deep conference with a thin woman who was crying and kept taking paper napkins from the table dispenser and wiping her face with them.

Rae knew better than to interrupt her.

‘Mary,’ she whispered to the youngest waitress in the house, ‘go over and fill up the coffee cups at that table. Don’t listen and do your best to look as if your mind is somewhere else, OK?’

‘Sure,’ said Mary, whose aunt Livvy had worked in Titania’s for donkey’s years and who knew better than to question any of the mad requests made of her. Rae knew her stuff and if Rae felt that looking mindless was required for this table, then that’s what they’d get.

‘Vivienne, put on something lively on the CD player,’ Rae added to the small woman at the till. Ella Fitzgerald was singing mournfully about lost love.

‘Gotcha,’ said Vivienne, spotting Patsy and her guest. She rifled through the CDs. ‘Aretha Franklin demanding respect?’

‘Perfect.’

Rae went into the kitchen and talked to Pavel, who was just leaving for his shift in a big hotel on the other side of the city. He was a fabulous worker but Rae worried Titania’s would lose him. He was working too hard, surely something had to give?

There was no time to ask him, he was rushing.

Denise, who took over when Pavel was off, admired the mille-feuilles he’d made earlier.

‘He’s an artist,’ she said.

‘An artist with pastry,’ agreed Rae.

She talked to the staff, did a stock check, and then came out front to work the till.

The elderly American lady who was living on the other side of the square was waiting for a latte, her smiling face gentle in repose.

‘Hello, pet,’ said Rae.

The woman’s mouth curled up slightly into what might or might not have been a wry smile and Rae instantly regretted using the term of affection. She must have offended this lady.

‘Forgive me,’ said Rae, ‘I don’t know your name and I don’t mean to offend you.’

‘It’s Eleanor,’ said the woman.

‘I’m Rae. Welcome, Eleanor,’ said Rae, instantly liking the lack of formality. If Will’s mother was there instead of Eleanor, she’d have insisted on
Mrs Kerrigan,
because ‘manners matter, Rae!’ While this elegant white-haired woman who walked stiffly, though with grace, was simply Eleanor.

She was older than Will’s mother, but she didn’t wear her age like armour, distancing herself from other people. Instead, she wore it lightly, a veil of wisdom and warmth.

‘Being called “pet” is very comforting, actually. That’s why I smile,’ Eleanor went on. ‘Not in disapproving amusement, I can tell you.’

Rae relaxed. ‘Thank you. I don’t always know everyone’s name and I like to, so when I don’t, I say “pet” and “love”. Some people don’t like it.’

‘Only the churlish, surely?’

Rae grinned. ‘Yes, but I can’t say that when I’m behind the till.’

‘Rae is a pretty name. Is it short for something?’ Eleanor asked.

‘I was called Rachel as a child,’ Rae admitted. She didn’t want to say that, one day, she’d been called Rae in school and it had stuck, more because she liked it than for any other reason. Rachel was her parents’ name for her, which was why she’d been happy to leave it behind, like so much of her past.

‘Somebody told me Rachel is Hebrew. Will I take the tray for you?’

‘Thank you.’ Eleanor stepped back politely and waited for Rae to go first. She thought of mentioning that her husband had been Jewish and their daughter was called Naomi, another beautiful Hebrew name.

A table by the window was free and Rae carried the tray to it.

‘Thank you,’ said Eleanor graciously, and sat down gingerly.

She was in pain, Rae could see, but for all Eleanor’s friendliness, Rae sensed that she was a person who liked to keep her life private.

At the table nearby, Patsy had succeeded in comforting her friend. The woman’s face was no longer tear-stained and she was finishing off one of the apple-and-cinnamon muffins.

As Rae passed, Patsy shot her a grin that said
thank you.

At three, Dulcie arrived to pick Rae up for a couple of Community Cares visits. They went to Delaney again, then across Kilmartin Avenue where a young couple with a small baby had both lost their jobs and needed to move out of their flat into a cheaper one. Unfortunately, the landlord was refusing to give them their deposit back, and due to the enormous grey areas in the housing law, they didn’t know what to do.

Dulcie recommended them asking a housing charity for advice. Sometimes, a phone call from somewhere officialsounding brought unscrupulous landlords to their senses. But only sometimes.

‘Poor things,’ she said as they left. ‘I’d love to tell them to talk to the community housing officer, but he’d make it worse.’

The local housing officer was a man who felt that anyone asking for his help needed to be humiliated first for the crime of being poor and disadvantaged. He only wanted to help people who crawled in on their hands and knees, and his favourite trick was to reduce clients, particularly the female ones, to tears.

The two women were silent as they headed for their last visit. Rae tried to calm herself. She was no use to anyone when impotent rage was fuelling her. But it was hard to be calm when you witnessed decent people being treated badly because they were poor and without power.

The last house on the list was round the corner from Golden Square but on the other side to Delaney. The more expensive side.

Wellington Gardens was a cul-de-sac where six huge new houses sat in a spacious semi-circle. When they had been built five years ago, the property pages had been full of superlatives about this new, American-style road.

‘Wisteria Lane comes to Dublin,’ the papers had said.

Rae and Dulcie had been to a coffee morning in one of the houses once, where a charitable-minded woman had invited her wealthy friends in to raise funds for CC. They’d admired the tiled hallway, shiny woodwork and a kitchen that came straight from an interiors magazine – and Rae had thought ruefully of her own kitchen, with its admittedly big but very unglossy old gas cooker, and cupboards which hadn’t changed a lot since the previous owner had been in situ in the 1980s.

She’d taken the generous cheque and by the time she got home, her sense of self had reasserted itself. She liked her kitchen, even if the units didn’t all match.

Dulcie reminded her of this coffee morning as they drove into the road. ‘The
style.
Jim still laughs at me about it. I went home and gave out stink about the state of our house, and why we’d need a skip to take out all the old furniture before we could even
get
people into the house to have a coffee morning.’

Rae laughed. Dulcie had hit the nail on the head, as usual.

‘I was the same,’ she said ruefully.

‘Well, you do compare, don’t you?’ Dulcie continued. ‘I suppose comparing makes you appreciate what you’ve got when we’re going into poor Mrs Mill’s house. She doesn’t have a giant cooker and a huge dishwasher or any of that stuff.’

There was silence as Dulcie negotiated the way past a fleet of shiny SUVs parked outside one house.

They pulled into the drive of the fifth house on the estate. The Lodge was surrounded by a thick four-foot hedge that was wonderful from a privacy point of view and even more wonderful if you were a burglar.

Dulcie rang the door bell and within seconds a dark-haired woman in a purple tracksuit opened the front door a crack. Her face was pale and her long hair lank.

‘Yes?’ she said, eyeing them both with a combination of anxiety and suspicion.

‘Community Cares,’ said Dulcie. ‘We talked on the phone?’

The woman they were to see was named Shona, but they didn’t use names on the doorsteps in case they were at the wrong house, in which case they’d apologise and retreat. Respect people’s privacy at all times, was part of the charity’s rules.

Shona nodded, opened the door and said nothing until they were inside.

‘The neighbours –’ was all she said then.

Rae and Dulcie understood. In some neighbourhoods, CC were like part of the family and welcomed as such. Here, in the land of new wealth, having to call on a charity for financial aid was comparable with being found shooting up heroin in an alley.

They followed Shona’s slight figure through to a large living room. In so many ways, the house was a match for the elegant house where the coffee morning had been held. The Lodge was a riot of subtle floral prints, all gorgeous stuff like in magazines Rae flicked through in the doctor’s waiting room. A Chinese silk rug spanned the huge living room with its large designer sofas, real oil paintings hung under golden picture lights: it all spoke of money.

According to Dulcie, who’d got the details from head office, the woman had no food in her huge American fridge to feed her two children. Her husband had lost his job, the money was gone, the house was worth less than the mortgage and there was simply nothing left to sell. The bottom had entirely fallen out of the art market. Nobody wanted to buy her oil paintings. There was no gas for the glossy four-wheel-drive jeep on the forecourt, on which they were unable to keep up the payments.

Without waiting for them to talk, Shona began an her litany of woe.

‘We’ve tried to sell everything,’ she said. ‘The car, the paintings, my jewellery. Diamonds make almost nothing, did you know that? Why did our mothers tell us to get diamonds?’ She held out bony hands that Rae guessed had once been manicured every week. Rae never got manicures, but then her mother had never told her to get diamonds, either.

‘Diamonds are useless. And shoes.’ Shona’s voice rose dangerously. ‘Second-hand shoes have no value at all. People admire them. “I love your shoes,” they say, but they won’t buy them off you. And the children – how do I tell them…’

This was the point at which people often broke down. Rae and Dulcie had been in many expensive houses this past year, and it happened every time. No matter how stoic the person was, the thought of their children’s disappointment brought them to their knees. Losing money in a giant economic meltdown could happen to anyone and was survivable. But no longer being able to give their children everything when they’d been brought up to expect it, that was the worst failure of all.

Rae could understand these feelings. Children were the repositories of so many hopes and desires. She’d never wanted her son to suffer any of the hurts she’d suffered.

‘Lyra’s in an exam year, her Junior Cert,’ Shona went on. ‘She keeps having nightmares. And Katya was supposed to be going on the school skiing holiday next year, but I’ve had to tell her there’s no way we can afford it. They’re only still in the school because we paid in full last September. She’ll have to leave and she was so looking forward to the skiing…’

Rae saw Dulcie’s mouth set in a firm line. Dulcie disapproved of such carry on as people sending teenagers off on skiing holidays with their private school.

Rae looked around the room as Dulcie talked through the normal CC issues like finding out what Shona and her husband were doing legally, checking to make sure they weren’t in danger of being thrown on to the street with the children, which would be another issue to solve.

‘No, it’s not that bad – yet,’ Shona said.

That’s when she began to cry. Not pretty crying, but silent ugly tears that made her face turn blotchy.

Rae could sense that Dulcie didn’t like Shona. When you’d worked with someone for as long as they’d been together, you could tell. Dulcie had very specific views on people for whom she had sympathy. Anyone who was doing their best to get out of the poverty trap and who wasn’t taking drugs, drinking like a fish or spending every spare cent of the children’s allowance on cigarettes was fine. In Dulcie’s book, someone like Shona – who’d once had everything, hadn’t appreciated it and had now spent it – didn’t fit the sympathy category.

‘Come on, now,’ Dulcie said firmly when five minutes of crying was up.

‘You don’t understand,’ Shona said, still sobbing. ‘It’s awful, I don’t know how to cope.’

‘We’ll help,’ Dulcie went on.

‘If only Conor could find another job. Look at us. We can’t pay the credit-card bills. We have nothing, nothing.’

Rae felt sympathy overwhelm her. She understood the horrible fear of having nothing and not knowing where to turn. ‘I know that it doesn’t look like it now, but it’s going to be all right,’ she began. She was a very calming person, everyone said. It was partly what made her so brilliant as a volunteer with the charity. She instinctively knew what to say to people in despair.