The Honey Queen (34 page)

‘Got yourself pregnant, did you?’ he said. ‘That turned out well for you, didn’t it, Miss Peggy, with all your fine notions of what you’d do and what you wouldn’t do. Carrying someone’s bastard, I suppose. No sign of a ring on that finger, is there?’

‘Stop it!’ hissed Peggy, her fury startling even herself. ‘Don’t you dare talk to me that way. You’re the bastard, and don’t you forget it.’

He took an angry step towards her, but she raised her mobile phone in his face. ‘If you lay a hand on me or my mother, I’ll phone the police in an instant and I swear I’ll have you locked up for so long that you’ll rot in jail, do you understand? Now get out of this room and leave us in peace.’

She’d never spoken to him like that before. But then, she’d never had a precious life inside her before either. Her baby made her strong. No way was she going to allow her child to witness her mother being treated the way she’d seen Kathleen treated.

She turned to see her mother sitting on the couch, almost catatonic, tears on her face but no expression there.

Peggy knelt beside her. ‘Mum, you’ve got to leave. Please! Please come with me. He’s destroying you. He might not use his fists, but he’s battering you into the ground just the same.’

‘No,’ her mother said, rocking to and fro now. ‘I can’t, we’re married.’

‘Screw marriage!’ yelled Peggy. ‘He’s a bastard and he’s ruined both of us. Please get out. You could live with me in Cork, mind the baby, do whatever you want to, just leave.’

‘You don’t understand,’ Kathleen said. ‘I’m all he has. Without me, he’d kill himself. I understand him, you see.’

Peggy leaned her head down on the couch and rested. She didn’t have the heart for such fights or such fierce loathing any more. She had done everything in her power over the years to get her mother to leave him. And there was nothing more she could do.

‘I’m going now,’ she said. ‘But I’m sending you a mobile phone. I’ll send it to Carola in the craft shop. You can pick it up off her and I’ll program in my number. Please, please phone me if you need me. I’ll call you when the baby’s due.’

‘Not Carola!’ begged Kathleen. ‘I told her he’s been getting better—’

Peggy looked with pity at her mother. ‘Men like my father never get better, Mam. Carola knows that damn well. Talk to her. You need someone on your side, because I’m too far away in an emergency and he’s getting worse. He’ll never change and he’ll destroy you. Promise me that you’ll talk to Carola. Promise me?’

Her mother nodded mutely.

They hugged silently, clinging tightly to each other. Then Peggy gathered up the precious baby things and took them out of the room. Her last sight of her mother was of Kathleen rocking back and forth on the couch.

T
he exhaustion was killing Frankie. It had come out of nowhere, like a hurricane, and now she woke up exhausted, spent parts of every day exhausted, and fell into bed at night after struggling to stay awake through dinner. Most evenings she barely felt able to join in the dinner-table conversation. Seth didn’t appear to notice, so delighted was he to chat endlessly with his sister about the work they were doing on the garden. Positive proof that couples married forever had nothing to say to each other, Frankie thought with unaccustomed sourness.

Frankie suspected that Lillie had noticed. In fact, over the past month, Frankie had come to the conclusion that there wasn’t much Lillie
didn’t
notice.

Her new-found sister-in-law was a very clever woman, but her predominant characteristic was kindness. And it was a kindness that extended to everyone she met. In the time she’d been staying with them, she appeared to have made friends with the whole of Redstone, from the people running the bakery to the young woman who’d set up the new wool shop, and she’d apparently struck up firm friendships with both Bobbi the beautician and Freya, a strangely adult fifteen-year-old who lived with her aunt and uncle in the row of houses that ran directly behind Maple Avenue.

‘Freya’s a marvellous girl,’ she told Seth and Frankie. ‘She’s very grown up, an old soul.’

Lillie had begun dropping in daily on an old lady she’d met one day, wheezing for breath as she tried to carry a bag of groceries home from the shops. Now, Lillie was doing the old lady’s shopping and tending her window-boxes.

‘I thought it was us Irish who were supposed to befriend every Tom, Dick and Harry,’ said Frankie one Friday evening, when she was leaning back against the window seat in the basement kitchen with a glass of wine, savouring the aromas of Lillie and Seth’s cooking.

‘My husband used to say that,’ said Lillie cheerfully, putting a dish of honey-roasted parsnips and carrots on the table. ‘His mother said he had the Irish charm.’

She looked sad suddenly, and Frankie felt like an absolute cow. There she’d been, feeling sorry for herself because Lillie had gotten to know all the locals while she never had the time to chat to anyone, forgetting that the poor woman had lost her husband only a few months ago. Frankie, who normally was very empathetic, had found herself so locked up in her own miseries that she hadn’t taken the trouble to ask about Sam.

‘Tell me about Sam,’ Frankie said now.

Lillie bowed her head.

‘I’m sorry,’ Frankie said quickly. ‘I didn’t mean to upset you.’

‘No, you haven’t, not at all.’ Lillie poked the parsnips with a serving spoon. ‘Freya gave me these from her uncle’s allotment,’ she said absently, ‘and the honey’s from the delicatessen. It’s local. They say honey’s very good if you suffer from hay fever. When you get the hives, Seth, you’ll see what I mean. Now that we’ve cleared away everything from the walled garden, we’ve got the perfect spot for them.’

‘Here, I’ll do that, Lillie,’ said Seth, gently taking the spoon from his sister.

She seemed unaware that tears had begun streaming down her face.

Frankie jumped up from her seat and went to her sister-in-law. ‘I am so sorry,’ she began.

‘No, I was the one brought up the subject,’ said Lillie. ‘Sometimes I can talk about him. Only today, I told Sue in the bakery that Sam could never resist fresh bread, and we laughed, because she says Zeke eats almost more bread than he cooks, and he’s so skinny!’ Lillie’s face fell. ‘But other times, it hurts so much thinking that Sam’s gone and I’ll never see him again. Never.’

She turned anguished eyes to Frankie and Seth. ‘I’ve loved being here, loved it, and I feel happy and needed, but today it’s hit me again that he’s gone. That I’m trying to find things to do to occupy myself so I don’t think too much about him.’

The way Lillie spoke made Frankie want to burst into tears.

‘But there are times when I get so wrapped up in here, in Redstone, that I can’t feel him. It’s as if he’s moving further and further away from me.’

Nobody spoke. There was nothing to say.

In bed later, Seth and Frankie instinctively moved together and settled into a comfortable hugging position, the way they used to every night, once upon a time.

‘Poor Lillie,’ said Seth, arms around his wife. ‘I can’t imagine what I’d do without you.’

Frankie lay there in silence, enjoying the unaccustomed feeling of her husband holding her.

Lillie’s anguish had upset her so much and yet even now she couldn’t sweep aside the anger she harboured towards Seth. It might have been irrational, but it was still there.

‘Love you,’ she muttered finally. Then, with a swift kiss on his cheek, she rolled over and turned off her bedside light.

It was a long time before she could sleep and she lay there, trying to be still, sensing her husband lying awake beside her.

Lillie would give her right arm to be this close to her husband, Frankie thought wearily, and all she could do was lie there letting the resentment flood through her. Seth hadn’t wanted her at all recently – she didn’t want to be rejected again. Far better to turn away before he got the chance to do it first.

She felt sure of only one thing: her marriage was falling apart.

Frankie had never doubted Seth’s love. From the very first time they’d met all those years ago in college they knew they’d been made for each other. They laughed at the same jokes. Read the same books. And Frankie could look at him across a crowded room and see that Seth was thinking exactly the same thing as she was just by the flicker of his eyes in her direction.

And now … now it was all different. Seth was different. It wasn’t that he was no longer the man she’d married; people changed, she knew that. Neither of them were the people they’d been all those years ago. But something fundamental in Seth had shifted since the loss of his job. Was it the lack of status? she wondered. Working in HR she knew that men and women approached work very differently. For a lot of women, work was a means to earn money and take care of their children. They were ambitious, yes, but the ambition ran side by side with the practical. For men the ambition was more important. She’d have thought that Seth was never the type of man whose job defined him; family had always come before career with him. He could have risen much higher, gone much further, if he hadn’t put Frankie and the children first. Yet somehow, when his job was taken away from him, it was as if his identity had been removed. And for all her theoretical and professional understanding of the effects of redundancy, Frankie hadn’t been able to help.

The renewed spring in Seth’s step was entirely thanks to Lillie. Together with Dessie, they’d transformed the bramble-filled wilderness into a soft landscaped haven, planted with cuttings supplied by Lillie’s new friends.
That
hurt like hell – Seth’s recovery had nothing to do with her. She knew Lillie was trying to help but Seth and Frankie had been so distant before Lillie arrived that perhaps her work now was just pushing them further and further apart.

Once upon a time, Frankie reflected, she and the children were the answer to every one of Seth’s problems, but now the children were gone and she was the answer to nothing. Sometimes she felt incredibly angry about it, all this rubbish about forty being the new twenty-five – it was complete cobblers. With a few dermatological tweaks and a bit of Botox here and there, forty might
look
like twenty-five. But these were just cosmetic things. The inner changes, the realization that life was not infinite, that you were no longer everything to the man you loved:
those
were the effects of ageing that mattered.

Frankie wondered if she should consult Dr Felix about Seth. Maybe say: ‘Seth is down and I can’t deal with that. What’s your advice? I need help because I’m struggling enough with my own things.’

She was now on hormone replacement pills, but none of it seemed to be making her feel any better. She was still as tearful and grumpy as ever. And sad, so very sad.

Frankie Green wasn’t ready to turn into an old lady just yet, but where did she fit in the world? Where did she fit in Seth’s world? For years she’d watched friends getting separated and divorced and thought how crazy it was, how perhaps they just hadn’t tried. And then Seth had retreated into his own world and left her behind. He’d practically slammed the door in her face and pinned a notice on it saying
Don’t enter, don’t come after me. I don’t need you. I don’t want you.
How could she explain all that to Felix? She couldn’t, because she didn’t understand it herself. All she knew was that it hurt.

Rather than consult Felix, she rang her sister.

‘I need to say something to him, Gaby, but what?’

Gabrielle had more than a hint of their mother in her.

‘Tell him he’s going round like a wet rag unless he’s talking about that bloody garden and you’ll have no marriage left if you don’t both make an effort soon.’

‘Thank you, Dr Phil,’ said Frankie wryly. ‘I’ll say it tonight, then. Just the facts – stop being a rag or pack your bags.’

‘Oh, I didn’t mean you should say it
that
baldly,’ Gaby protested. ‘But this is Seth you’re talking about. You can talk to Seth about anything. Just explain that things have gone wrong and you want to fix them. Is that so hard?’

Yes, it is, Frankie thought sadly.

As if in some telepathic act of helpfulness, Lillie said she was tired that evening and wanted to go to bed early, leaving Seth and Frankie alone in the kitchen with football on the TV.

Now is the perfect time to say something, Frankie told herself. But for once, she was at a loss for words. Normally she could find the words for anything: going-away speeches, mediating disputes, counselling someone who’d been sexually harassed … Telling the children when they were small that they were wonderful and they were capable of everything and really it didn’t matter if they didn’t win a medal on sports day. She’d had all those words, but now her supply of words had dried up.

Seth sat at the kitchen table, a glass of wine to one side, the newspaper crossword in front of him, vaguely watching the football. The sports channel always seemed to be on in the background these days. Did Seth like having the television on because it meant there could be no talking? Did he think that if they actually
talked
, everything would fall apart?

Frankie toyed with the idea of turning the television off, then thought: At least it’s noise. What if I tell him what’s in my heart and he doesn’t answer me? What if he says, ‘It’s over, I don’t want to be with you any more.’ What then?

There was something else. Frankie was worried that Lillie had become the glue holding their marriage together. When Lillie went home, maybe that glue would shatter and they’d be left with nothing.

‘Seth, I love you,’ she blurted out. ‘I love you so much and …’

Oh, what could she say? He was peering at her in puzzlement over his bifocals. He, too, was looking old, she realized with a shock.

Why did nobody tell you about this stage in a marriage? Why did no one ever speak about
this
?

‘I just feel we’ve drifted so far apart and I don’t know what to do, it frightens me,’ she said, astonished to find that her voice was tremulous.

‘Do we have to talk about this now?’ he said. He looked weary, as if he’d just come back from a marathon and simply needed to lie down and not utter a single word.