The Heart Whisperer (48 page)

The day after she paid the mechanic, it had. Lorcan had called to say that she had been cast in the second series of
The Spaniard
. For some reason, the producers had decided to kill off Emma Lacey's character, Lady Kathryn, and come up with a new storyline involving the shepherdess and the Earl. The shoot was starting in July and Claire would be needed for twenty full days. She wondered if Shane would be on the set. Every time she thought about him, she felt dizzy with longing. She guessed
that things had worked out with his wife and she knew she should be glad for him, so she tried to be.

The Dicentra had long stems of feathery leaves and spires of small, heart-shaped, pink flowers. All her dad's old tools had fallen apart so Claire had bought him some new ones. The trowel she used to dig the hole still had the label attached with a little plastic thread.

‘Is that deep enough?' She shaded her eyes to look up at him.

‘Plenty deep.' He took the lid off the green tube. ‘There's a note in here. I don't have my glasses.'

Claire was shaking the Dicentra roots free from the plastic pot. ‘It's probably just the invoice from the cremation company. I'll take care of that, Dad.'

He tucked the note into the empty plant pot, sighed and shook the tube over the hole. Claire watched the fine grey powder and grit falling and thought of Dog's tangle of coat-hangery legs, his warm yellow eyes, the way the front half of him turned a corner before the back half, the weight of his huge paws. It seemed impossible that all that life could be reduced to a little pile of grey powder and grit. She put the plant into the hole and piled the soil back in, pressing it down with her hands. Then she rested her hand on the earth, as if she was giving Dog one last pat. ‘I hope he's up in dog heaven,' her voice was hoarse, ‘watching Anne Doyle reading the news.'

‘The funny thing is,' her dad leaned on his stick, ‘I think he just used the news as an excuse to get me out of my room a couple of times a day. It did me good, you know, not to be in there all the time.' He handed her the cardboard tube and the plant pot. ‘All those years, I thought I had rescued Dog. Now I think that he rescued me.'

Claire stood at the sink, watching her dad talking to the Dicentra. She'd decided to stay and look after him until the end of May. By then, he should be able to look after himself. She rinsed the little crumbs of dirt off her fingers and dried her hands then picked up the tube and the empty plant pot and dropped them into the bin. Just as the lid was closing, she saw the note.

Shane didn't answer his mobile. ‘He's gone out for lunch,' the receptionist said when Claire rang the surgery.

‘Do you know where?'

‘I can't really say.'

‘He left me a message to call him,' Claire's heart was hammering, ‘but he's not picking up.'

‘Well,' the receptionist sounded reluctant to disclose any information, ‘he had his running gear on. He might have gone for a jog in Blackrock Park but I couldn't really say for certain.'

There were a few joggers doing circuits of the park but they were too far away for Claire to see properly. She was heading for the track when the dog raced past her. He was black and white and he was wearing a jaunty red bandana. The pond was covered in algae and he must have thought it was a continuation of the grass. When he tried to run across it, his paws pedalled in the air for a moment, then he fell through it and disappeared. Claire held her breath and watched the water. After a moment, she saw him bobbing back up again with a long trail of pondweed draped over one eye.

The swan saw him too. He shot across the pond, hissing so loudly that Claire could hear him thirty feet away. The dog paddled to the bank and tried to haul himself out but the sides were too steep. He paddled back out towards the swan.

Claire ran to the edge of the pond. ‘Here boy!' Claire shouted, but he saw the swan bearing down on him and started to swim in panicky little circles trying to get away.

‘Get. Your. Dog. Away. From. That. Swan!' Claire turned and saw the shouty old man hobbling towards her, waving his stick. When she turned back, the swan had reached the dog. She heard its beak snapping like castanets as it pecked him. He went under again and came back up again, choking.

Before she knew what she was doing, Claire had kicked off her shoes. She grabbed the stick from the astonished old man, sat down on the grass and swung her legs into the pond. It was shockingly cold. She took a breath and slid in. The water closed around her knees and then her thighs, her hips, her waist and her chest. She felt the soft mud oozing between her toes.

‘I can't swim,' she whispered, though there was nobody to hear except the old man, who stamped off to find the park keeper. She held on to the bank with one hand and waved the stick. ‘Leave him alone!' she shouted. The swan was fifteen feet away, circling the floundering dog. It whipped out its long neck and the dog let out a yelp.

Claire's heart was hammering as she let go of the bank and her chattering teeth were keeping time. The water was up to her shoulders now. The smell of it turned her stomach. She edged out into the pond, step by shaking step.

The swan flapped his wings and rose up in the water when he saw her, but she managed to hook the walking stick around the dog's bandana. As she turned for the bank again, she caught her foot on something sharp and plunged, face first under the water. Her eyes closed. She felt the air escaping from her mouth when she gasped. She staggered and fell farther, her free hand clawing at nothing. Then she felt something above her, churning through the water. The dog.

Claire grabbed hold of him and managed to pull herself up. The bank was only a few feet away. She held on to the dog's bandana and made one last lunge. She hauled herself out then pulled the dripping dog out behind her. He shook himself happily then galloped off towards the bandstand without a backward glance.

Claire kneeled on the grass and spat out a mouthful of dank pond water. Her hair was plastered to her head, her arms and hands covered in green slime.

‘That was pretty impressive,' a voice said, ‘for someone who's scared of water and dogs.' Shane was standing over her in shorts and a T-shirt. There was a sheen of sweat on his forehead. He held out his hand and Claire wiped her hand on the grass then let him help her up. Filthy water was streaming from her hair. She smelled appalling. ‘I was looking for you!' she gasped.

‘I was looking for some crazy woman who was supposedly attacking a swan.' His brown eyes were amused. ‘Someone just called the surgery to report it.'

‘I found your note.' Claire put her hand into the pocket of her shirt to pull it out but it had dissolved into mushy pulp.

Shane frowned. ‘Just now? I asked your friend to give it to you two weeks ago.'

The shouty old man was heading towards them with the park warden. ‘That's her,' Claire could hear him saying. ‘She stole my stick, then attacked the swan!'

Shane pulled a piece of pondweed out of Claire's hair. ‘I thought you didn't want to see me.'

‘I wanted to so badly.'

There was a smile at the corners of his mouth. ‘Here I am.'

‘Hold on to that woman!' the shouty old man bellowed at Shane. ‘Don't let her go!'

Shane put his hands on Claire's wet shoulders, his smile turning, slowly, into a grin. ‘Sounds like good advice to me.'

The taxi was stuck at the lights in Blackrock. ‘This bloody city,' the driver sighed, ‘does my head in.'

‘Mine too.' Ray was glad to be leaving it.

‘Off to London.' The driver looked in the rear-view mirror. ‘Business or pleasure?'

‘I've got family there.' Ray had rented a small house in Notting Hill, a five-minute walk from where Ash and Maurice DeVeau lived. He had a couple of songs that he might show to Paul Fisher but there was no hurry with that. Finding a way to be part of Willow's life was more important.

‘She misses you,' Ash had said on the phone, yesterday. ‘She keeps telling everyone that her other dad is best friends with David Bowie.'

The driver nodded at the park below the road. ‘Bit nippy for a dip, even with all your clothes on.'

Ray turned and saw a woman standing by the pond in dripping clothes talking to a jogger. He was too far away to see her properly. She looked like Claire but it couldn't be Claire, he told himself, as the lights changed and the taxi pulled away again. Claire was terrified of water.

A year ago, Kelly thought, the Dillons had looked like strangers waiting in line at the bank; now they looked like a family.

Claire was standing between Nick and Tom, her hair a coppery blur beneath Nick's dark umbrella.

Nick looked over his shoulder and she smiled at him. A tiny feather of fear fluttered down her spine as she thought how close they'd come to losing one another. Things weren't going to be easy, Nick was struggling to find work. It might take years before they could afford IVF. But they had one another. That was all that mattered. They'd work the rest out.

‘Well,' Claire's dad put a bunch of Dicentra on the grave and straightened up, ‘I'm just going to see if I can find Phil Lynott's marker.' He made his way slowly along the row of headstones, leaning on his stick, the wind tearing at his raincoat and blowing his grey hair around his head.

‘He isn't even buried here,' Nick said. ‘He's in the graveyard in Sutton.'

They stood, side by side on the wet grass, huddled under the umbrella, looking down at the slim, white marble headstone. Claire pulled her coat around her and read the faded silver inscription on the white marble.

‘Tread carefully, for you tread on my dreams.'

Twelve months ago, on her thirty-third birthday, Claire had dreamed of changing her life, getting her career back on track, and mending her broken heart. She could never have imagined back then how much real change the year would bring.

Or how much better she would come to know her father, her brother, her mother, herself.

It had been a wet day, just like this, Nick remembered. Summer rain, slanting in sideways. The sun coming out, now and then, glancing off the cellophane bouquets on the other graves. The smell of turned soil.

Someone had given them a white rose each. Claire's had a tiny thorn on the stem so he had swapped with her. At the end, after the coffin had been lowered into the grave, he dropped his rose in on top of the shiny lid and squeezed Claire's hand. ‘You have to drop your flower in now.'

But she wouldn't. He tried to unpeel her fingers from the stem
one by one, but she held on tight. ‘I want to keep it for Mum,' she whispered.

He turned to look at his sister now. She was holding a bunch of garden flowers in her hand. Long green stems with tiny, pink, heart-shaped flowers. She bent down and held on to them for a long while and then she let them go.

The woman looked out at Claire from a dazzling summer's afternoon. Her coppery hair was pulled back into an untidy bun. A few wet tendrils had escaped and stuck to her neck, below her ears. She wore a dark green swimsuit with lighter green straps and her pale shoulders were jewelled with tiny beads of water. Behind her, there was a wonky triangle of light blue sky and a little scrap of darker blue sea. She was grinning at the camera, shading her face with one hand, her dark green eyes sparkling with excitement. She looked so happy that it was hard, looking at her, not to feel happy too.

It was Claire's favourite photograph of herself. The one Shane had taken on her thirty-fifth birthday, the day he had started teaching her how to swim.

BIRTH NOTICES

DILLON Kelly and Nick are over the moon to announce the birth of their daughter Maura Claire on 12 June 2012. She is welcomed with much love by her parents and their families in Dublin and Seattle.

From Wikipedia
‘
Little Stars
'
Label – Tarantula

‘Little Stars' is a pop song written by Irish singer-songwriter Ray Devine and performed by Canadian singer Maurice DeVeau on DeVeau's debut solo album
Chromosome 16
. It was the first of many collaborations between the pair and topped the charts, in the UK, Canada, Australia and Japan.

Thank you to generous fellow writers Marian Keyes, Kate Kerri-gan and Cathy Kelly for all their help and encouragement.

To my old friend Wendy Williams and my new friend Bernice Barrington for reading early drafts.

To my wonderful brother Bernard and my dear friend Susan McNulty for dotting all the ‘t's and crossing all the ‘i's. (You can see why I need their help!)

To my lovely sister Frances McClelland for giving my first book to every single person she knows.

To my brilliant agent, Jonathan Lloyd. To my patient and insightful editor Kate Mills. And to everyone at Orion, especially Susan Lamb, Juliet Ewers and Jemima Forrester.

To everyone who helped with research. Eamonn Moore, Ailish Connolly, Nick Kelly, Sarah Francis, Dara McClatchie, Barry Grace, Gemma Reeves, Fiona Kerrigan, Eithne Hand, Noel Storey, Doug Lee and, of course, Haggis.

And to my husband, Neil Cubley, who is everywhere in this book and in my heart.

For reading every single draft. For his advice and his edits and his brilliant suggestions.

For cheering me up and talking me down and taking me out. For having faith in me. For making me laugh every single day. And for coming down that hill in Skyros, eleven years ago this week, to find me.

Also by Ella Griffin
Postcards from the Heart

AN ORION EBOOK

First published in Great Britain in 2013 by Orion Books.

This ebook first published in 2013 by Orion Books.

Copyright © Ella Griffin 2013

The right of Ella Griffin to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.