The Honey Queen (40 page)

‘We’re nearly there now.’ Tonight they were going to stop at the small farm where his uncle still lived. There wasn’t much of the family left, and no surviving relatives on the peninsula. Some had settled in Wales, others in America. All had scattered. Seth had emailed them and was waiting for replies.

‘They’ll want to see you or talk to you,’ he said. ‘Searching for long-lost relatives is all the rage here, you know!’

‘How far is the sea?’ she asked.

Seth considered. ‘Maybe seven miles,’ he said. ‘I learned to swim here. You won’t believe it when you actually see the sea because our “swimming pool” was a rocky basin. It was easier to swim than to walk on the sharp stones.’ He laughed, clearly thinking of days spent with his cousins on the small farm.

‘Your uncle won’t mind me coming to see him?’ Lillie asked tentatively. She knew not everyone welcomed the emergence of relatives they never knew they had. She’d read enough about it to understand that adopted children were often rejected. Some families couldn’t forgive the lie that one member had lived with all their lives. Others didn’t want their lives cluttered up with another person, thank you very much.

She turned in her seat and smiled at Seth, who seemed so happy now that he was driving along these treacherous narrow little roads. He’d not been like that. He’d welcomed her with open arms, into his life and into his heart. She was so lucky.
Thank you, Sam
, she prayed silently.
Thank you for sending me here and making Seth and Frankie open their arms to me.

Of course, she knew that the universe liked balance. If her heart was swelling from the love she’d received from her long-lost brother and his wife, then she was certainly giving something back. She could see the huge cracks in Frankie and Seth’s marriage and she was determined to do everything she could to help mend them. Not in an interfering way – no. But they were like two swimmers in a lake in a fog. Calling each other, needing each other and yet just not able to touch. Frankie and Seth loved each other, of that Lillie hadn’t the slightest doubt. But they were at that dangerous moment where everything could go horribly wrong and if she could help prevent that, then she would.

‘We’re here,’ said Seth, without warning.

‘Already?’ she said, but he was driving in a narrow gateway and up a muddy track.

In front of her was a stone cottage set on the hillside, looking like something from a child’s drawing. A low roof, two small windows at the front and a wide door, painted red. A water barrel sat under the front gutter and a stack of turf was neatly to one side. The house had held her mother’s seven brothers and sisters and it was tiny. Lillie just stared when Seth stopped the car.

It was neat and tidy, but so poor, like, like … like nothing she’d seen before. And this was the place her mother had called home?

An old man with a stoop wearing a very old dark suit peered out of the door.

‘Uncle Liam!’ said Seth, and got out of the car.

He and the old man embraced as Lillie slowly unfolded herself from the front seat and walked over to them. More pieces of the puzzle were falling into place.

‘Lillie,
a stór
,’ said the old man, and he held out his arms to her.

‘It means darling in Irish,’ said Seth helpfully.

‘Aren’t you the cut of your mother, Lillie!’ Liam added, and then she was in his arms and she smelled the scent of pipe tobacco and salty skin and old clothes that were probably not aired enough. He had to be at least ninety, the last of her mother’s siblings alive, and he was welcoming her home.

‘Liam, how lovely to meet you,’ she said, holding on tight.

‘That’s a great accent you have there,’ he said, a smile in his voice.

‘Right back at you,’ said Lillie tearfully.

They sat in the dark kitchen of the house, which was clean but so very old and apparently had no comfortable seats at all. Liam poked at the stove and put a big, dull tin kettle on to boil so he could make tea.

From the cream sideboard, he produced a box of photographs and set them on the table in front of Lillie.

‘Have a poke around in those, now, and you’ll find some of your mother.’

There were not that many photographs in the box, but among the very small, white-rimmed sepia-toned ones, she found her mother as a young woman, wearing a 1940s dress with the era’s big shoulders and a scoop neck. Her hair was in a Betty Grable roll and she wore bright lipstick, probably the red of the day, Lillie thought tremulously.

She’d seen photos of her mother in Seth’s albums, but they’d been from after her marriage. These were pure gold, the pictures taken before.

‘Was she pregnant then?’ Lillie wondered.

Liam cast a look at the photo as he passed with the teapot.

‘She was a fine woman, no doubt about it, the best-looking of us all.’

‘Did you know about me?’ asked Lillie.

She wasn’t sure if it was the right thing to say, but she needed to know. Liam was the youngest but even so he might have heard the stories, might have some light to shed on the old mystery.

‘Arra, I did,’ he said softly. ‘Jennifer was like yourself, Lillie, always a beauty, and she was doing a line with young Michael Doherty for a few months when he upped and went off to join the war. His poor mother never got over it, to be honest.’ Liam took a sip of tea slowly. He did everything slowly, Lillie realized. ‘He was killed in the basic training. An accident, they said. Didn’t even get on to a boat to see the action. We all knew that Jennifer had a baby to come and we knew no good could come of it.’

His ancient eyes, of a blue not unlike Lillie’s own, sought hers.

‘
A stór,
you might be thinking it was cruel because of the way it happens today, but then, sure, she’d have been ostracized. Mother Vincent in the convent in the town was a good woman, she said she’d help, seeing as how Michael had been killed and that. She came up with the plan and that was that. Jennifer went off to the convent in Cork and she didn’t come back to us until she was a married woman, five years later. I think,’ he said sorrowfully, ‘that she couldn’t cope with seeing the land and the people because she’d grieve too much for the baby. For you.’

‘Did my father know, do you think?’ asked Seth.

Liam took another sip of tea and considered it. ‘I can’t say as he did and I can’t say as he didn’t,’ he announced finally. ‘But he loved Jennifer better than any man, and that was the end of it. She was a good woman, you know.’

‘I know,’ said Lillie.

Liam smiled, his face creasing into a multitude of wrinkles. ‘As long as you do,’ he said. ‘Come on and we’ll walk along the road and I’ll tell you about your mother. Seth here thinks he knows it all, but he doesn’t,’ teased Liam. ‘I have plenty of tales in my head about her.’

He led them out of the house into the bright, almost white light of the sea and the sky combined. ‘Now, Michael’s people lived over there on yonder hill, but they had weak chests, you know, and when Michael went, his brother only lasted another year and he was gone too. It was a cruel life then. Walk with me and we’ll see their house. It’s only a ruin now, but you need to stand in it and get a feel for him.’

He held on to Lillie’s hand as they walked, and he talked to her in his gentle accent. As they drew closer to the ruin of her father’s house, Lillie felt that she’d finally completed her journey in Ireland. This was what she’d come to see.

That her young mother had done the very best for her baby was clear to Lillie now. She was in awe of this woman who had gone on to build a life for herself after an early unmarried pregnancy.

In this wild landscape, with the wind whipping around them, she felt closer to Jennifer than ever.

Half-listening to Liam, she closed her eyes and prayed:
I hope you’re with Sam, Jennifer, and with your husband, Daniel, and Ruth, and everyone you ever loved, plus
my mother and father too. And poor Michael. You’re all a part of me.

‘I like to pray when I walk too,’ remarked Liam. ‘It must be a family thing. You can take the girl out of Kerry, but you can’t take Kerry out of the girl, can you?’

Seth and Lillie joined him in his laughter.

‘Will you come and have dinner with us tonight in the town?’ Seth asked.

Liam considered this carefully.

‘If I can hear all about your life, Lillie, I will,’ he said. ‘If I’m going off on my travels to visit you now, I’ll need to know.’

Lillie hugged him. ‘That you will,’ she said fondly, ‘that you will.’

O
n Monday morning, Frankie drove to work, happy to think that Seth and Lillie would be back by the time she got home and she wouldn’t be alone any more. She might cook something special for supper. Her mind whirred with possibilities. Lillie and Seth had been doing most of the cooking and Frankie thought how nice it would be if she did it for a change. The night before, she’d finally rung her old colleague, Amy, and they’d arranged a dinner in the next week. Amy had insisted they come and meet her husband, and see the garden, complete with the two hives. Just talking to Amy – who clearly loved cooking – had made Frankie feel in one of her Domestic Goddess moods.

She’d go out at lunchtime and see if she could get ingredients for something nice.

Frankie had an early morning appointment with Dr Felix to talk about how she was getting on with her HRT. She sat in the waiting room making notes about things she had to do that day and scanning through emails on her BlackBerry. There was one from Anita, sent via her mobile, with a link to a news item.

Everyone in Dutton was het up about rumours of an impending merger with the giant US insurance corporation, Uncle Sam. Despite many of the staff worrying about it, Frankie was convinced it would never come true.

‘Look, guys, the Monopolies Commission would go berserk,’ she reasoned. ‘Uncle Sam already own Unite Insurance, which has been cleaning up the market here. They’ll never be allowed to swallow us up.’

‘But if they do,’ persisted Lydia, the office junior and proud possessor of a mortgage the size of a Saudi prince’s Ferrari repair bill, ‘it would mean job losses, wouldn’t it?’

‘If it happened,’ said Frankie patiently, ‘then yes, there would be redundancies. There always are in these situations. But it’s not going to happen.’

She hugged Lydia in a way definitely not encouraged in most Human Resources manuals. There was something about Lydia’s small, oval face and wild curls which reminded Frankie of her own darling Emer. She had the same sweet smile but Lydia didn’t have Emer’s fiery spark of independence, inherited from Frankie herself.

Had Frankie taken the rumours seriously, she’d have marched into the CEO’s office and demanded an answer. But she knew that in the current economic climate, the business sector was a hotbed of wild rumours about receivership, mergers and massive pay-offs for hopeless executives. Frankie had always been too shrewd to buy into any of it.

Besides, she had enough to worry about without adding the latest conspiracy theories to the list.

When she got in to see Dr Felix, he checked her blood pressure and asked how she was getting on with the HRT.

‘I don’t know if it’s working,’ she said bluntly. ‘I’m still permanently exhausted, and I’m being an absolute bitch to Seth,’ she added guiltily, because she felt that she had to tell someone other than her sister.

‘Come back in three months for another check-up. You’ll be fine,’ Dr Felix had said in that comforting way of his.

I hope so, Frankie thought as she left the surgery and returned to her car.

If she hadn’t been so absorbed in her own problems, Frankie might have thought a little more about Anita’s email. Her work antennae might have been up and if it had been, it would have been shivering with the signals it was picking up. But Frankie was mentally off her game because she felt so tired. She hated the fatigue days. They came out of the blue: a sweeping sense of utter fatigue that could drain her whole body of energy and make her feel up to doing absolutely nothing but lying down. Of course, this was not a possibility in Dutton Insurance. So when Frankie got to the office she took two effervescent vitamin C energy tablets in water instead of one with her morning coffee and made the coffee stronger than usual.

‘Any messages?’ she called to her assistant.

Ursula, who was hurriedly painting her nails under her desk, called back, ‘No.’

‘Are you doing your nails again?’ Frankie asked.

‘Yes,’ admitted Ursula.

‘Darling, just because you work for me and I understand the effort it takes to look good,’ Frankie said, ‘doesn’t mean that all bosses will feel the same. So as a general rule, do not paint your nails in the office. Run to the ladies’ loo and do it if absolutely necessary. Otherwise just take the polish off.’

‘I can’t,’ said Ursula. ‘They were blue and there’s still some on and I have to paint another bit on or they’ll look terrible.’

‘I have nail-varnish remover in my drawer,’ said Frankie. ‘Every working woman needs a kit.’

Her mentor, Marguerite, had drummed this into her:

‘You need spare tights, spare knickers, tampons, headache tablets, deodorant, and a fresh top in case something gets spilled on yours. Possibly even a spare suit hidden away in a cupboard somewhere, and definitely a nice pair of high heels.’

Frankie walked out to Ursula with the nail-varnish remover and some cotton wool. ‘Quick,’ she hissed. ‘Get into the bathroom and take it off now.’

‘Frankie, you’re brilliant,’ sighed Ursula. ‘You’re the best boss ever.’

‘Oh, stop that,’ chided Frankie, walking back to her desk, but there was a smile on her lips anyway.

By midday the effervescent vitamin C and the extra-strong coffee had started to do their stuff. Frankie had managed to get through an enormous amount of work and was feeling pretty pleased with herself, answering with a cheery, ‘Hello, Frankie Green,’ when her phone rang.

Immediately the slightly adenoidal tones of the Deputy CEO’s PA came on the line. ‘He wants to see you in the boardroom at two,’ said Maire sharply.