The House On Willow Street (19 page)

Death was a part of Irish life as much as birth was. The cycle of birth, death and rebirth was part of a pre-Christian, pre-Celtic Ireland that had lived on through the centuries. The rituals might have changed but the crowds remained constant.

Her father was so well loved that the whole town had turned out for his funeral, like today. Tess could remember her sister sobbing in the front pew as she knelt on one of the old embroidered kneelers. Suki had cried and sobbed and yet managed to check her mascara in the funeral car mirror as they drove back to the house, where tea, drinks and sandwiches were laid out.

“Dad loved a party,” Suki had said. “He’d love this one. Did you buy enough drink, Tess? I might make us pink gins, wouldn’t that be lovely? Dad would like that.”

At the time, Tess had been so grief-stricken that she’d simply gaped openmouthed at her sister and said nothing. How could she think of making pink gins when their father was dead? Darling, darling Dad. But then that was Suki all over: try and find the fun element to everything. The fun element meant you could avoid thinking about the actual sadness.

For years, this had annoyed Tess beyond measure. Now, Tess felt sorry for her older sister. She didn’t think Suki had ever mourned their father properly; had ever mourned
anything
, for that matter. Suki didn’t do the past, she was too busy rushing toward the future with both hands held out, like a child about to receive a birthday present.

Tess looked around the church today, at the couples and families who had come to pay their respects. She had nobody with her.

A soprano launched into “Panis Angelicus” and Tess felt the tears well up inside. Music did that to her, grabbed her heart and twisted it. She had to stop thinking like this. It was stupid, futile. She’d think instead of Kitty and Zach. She’d hugged Zach this morning before he’d gone to school and he hadn’t pulled away and said, “
Oh, Ma
,” the way he sometimes did. It was as if he knew she was sadder than she should have been over the death of an old lady with dementia.

Seventeen-year-olds were supposed to be totally self-absorbed, and Zach could be that way at times. Yet he was remarkably intuitive. She’d never told him about Cashel or why Anna Reilly was a special link with the past, but somehow, she thought he understood. He was a wise old soul, as Suki liked to say. Pity Suki hadn’t been to see them for so long, then, Tess thought crossly.

Finally, the funeral was over and the priests, the coffin and the chief mourners were coming down the church. Tess tried to hide behind the crowd of people because she didn’t want Cashel to see her. She’d come to pay her respects to his mother, nothing more. The tradition at local funerals was for people to throng around the bereaved and offer their sympathies after the coffin was loaded into the hearse. Today, there were hundreds of people in a big crowd around the entrance of the church and it took Tess quite a while to
emerge. She had no plan to go to the graveyard. Instead she was going to head back to the shop, which she’d shut for the morning. That was on her mind as she finally made it outside and looked instinctively toward the hearse where Cashel and Riach stood. At that instant, Cashel saw her.

Tess was in the middle of a group of people pushing out of the chapel and yet she still felt as if she was all alone with Cashel’s harsh gaze upon her. Nobody else had ever looked at her the way he’d looked that last time, with revulsion in his eyes. And that was the way he looked at her now. Instinctively she winced as if she’d been struck.

“Sorry, sorry,” she muttered, as she tried to escape the group of people coming down the steps toward Cashel and Riach. But the crowd was moving as one and Tess was carried inexorably toward the two brothers. Catching sight of her, Riach smiled sadly, before realizing that his brother was standing like a piece of granite beside him. Riach reached out for her, leaning past the crowd of mourners. Tess clasped his hands in sympathy, but she was too aware of Cashel beside him, glaring at her, and she pulled away quickly without saying anything.

Turning back into the crowd, she jostled her way toward the steps of the church, where she could see an escape route. Her heart was pounding and she knew her face was red and flushed. She shouldn’t have come. It had been a mistake. She could have mourned at Anna’s grave another time.

Riach might have told Cashel she was coming, but that didn’t mean she was welcome.

Tess barely saw the people she bumped into in her haste to disappear, until one of them spoke to her.

“Tess, how are you?” ventured Danae, having noticed her flushed skin and shocked expression. “You look a little unwell.”

“I’m fine,” stammered Tess, even though she knew she was anything but fine.

She couldn’t stop now. If only she could make it to the shop. Silkie would be waiting for her, she could hold her tight and sob her heart out, then she would be fine. Right now all she needed was to be as far away from Cashel Reilly as possible.

Cashel had often wondered what he’d do if he saw Tess Power again after all these years. He’d thought about it many, many times, wondering what he’d say to her. He simply hadn’t thought he’d see her at his mother’s funeral.

And in that instant, that electric glance had told him that it wasn’t all over, that he’d never,
ever
forget.

He wasn’t sure what he’d thought she’d look like: older, dried out, maybe. That’s what he’d wanted. For her to have diminished for having turned him down. And yet she was none of those things. Tess Power looked older, naturally, but despite the black clothes in honor of his mother, she had a glow about her. Her fair hair curled as wildly as ever, but it was short now, probably some chic salon’s work, a messy look that cost a fortune.

She looked strangely more like her sister Suki than she used to, a little like the photographs of their long-dead mother, despite the Power coloring. When they were kids, she’d always looked different, softer than other girls, and she still did, but there was no mistaking those cheekbones, the full lips. Being older suited her: her face had lost the puppy fat of youth, enhancing the elegant beauty that had been there all along.

He’d watched, stunned, as she’d come toward the group of people surrounding him and Riach. He had to hand it to her: Tess Power had guts.

That morning, Riach had muttered about everyone in the town coming, including “all the old pals from school . . .”

Now, Cashel realized what that phrase had meant: Tess.

Mechanically, he shook hands and accepted condolences from the hordes of people lined up to talk to him.

“I knew your mother, she was a wonderful woman,” they all said.

“She’ll be sadly missed in the village.”

“It’s a mercy really, Cashel, she wasn’t herself.”

He let the words flow over him. People did their best in times of pain, they tried to find the right things to say, but when you were hurting it was all so meaningless.

He remembered Tess and what it had been like all those years ago and the things his mother and Riach had said. They’d done their best to console him, but that too had been meaningless.

“You’ve clearly made your mind up, so go. I suppose you’ll forget her,” Riach had said nineteen years ago, none too confidently.

His mother had been more prosaic. “If you want to go off and leave Tess this way, Cashel, then you must do it. Remember that I’m here for you. Avalon is here for you. Wherever you go, you can always come back. And wherever you are, you’ll always have our love.”

That love was being buried today.

The funeral director, recognizing who was in charge, gave Cashel a nod to signal that it was time they left for the graveyard.

Cashel nodded in return. It was time.

A fine mist began to descend upon the graveyard as the ceremony ended. The gravediggers had moved forward to the
edge of the grave, ready to start filling in the earth. Cashel couldn’t remember the last time he’d been at a graveyard ceremony. When he was a child, many kids of his age had been to every funeral their mothers had been to. It was the Irish way: children were taken to funerals, perhaps in an effort to help them understand the cycle of living and dying. In the countryside, there was no escaping death—it was everywhere. Animals were born and died, the pig you’d played with as a piglet was killed and turned into sausages, the scrawny chicken who’d never been a good layer ended up in the cooking pot. And people went back to the ground, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

Anna hadn’t been one of the mothers who’d taken her children to the funeral of every Tom, Dick and Harry. But even so, Cashel had been to enough of them; he’d seen enough damp earth spilled on coffins. He was sorry now that they hadn’t considered cremation. He hated the idea of his mother lying in the damp earth, food for worms. But today was the sort of day she’d have relished when she was well: the day with all her friends around her and her beloved sons, too.

Rhona hadn’t come, although his assistant had e-mailed her with the information. He wasn’t surprised; there had never been any real closeness between Anna and his ex-wife.

Riach was busy talking to people, saying the right things, his wife at his side. Charlotte was dressed in black, like they all were; she was indeed a fine woman, with short dark hair and small, dark eyes that viewed the world with kindness and wisdom. She was a good wife to Riach, Cashel knew that. His mother had never needed to worry about her younger son’s choice in the marital stakes. She’d been so happy at Riach and Charlotte’s wedding day ten years before.

They had got married in Rome—something which had pleased Cashel, because he knew there was no danger of
bumping into Tess. It was stupid really. He’d been married to Rhona then, wealthy, obviously happy, with more money than they knew what to do with, and yet he couldn’t stop thinking about the small-town girl he left behind. Only his mother had ever seemed to be aware of the fact.

“It’s all in the past, Cashel,” she’d told him as they posed for photographs.

Riach had cracked a joke about Avalon being a match for the glories of Rome, and immediately Cashel’s mind had drifted back to his hometown and all that was there.

“There’s no point in looking back. Her life has moved on and so has yours,” his mother had said shrewdly.

“What do you mean, ‘her life has moved on’?” he’d asked, and then felt angry with himself for wanting to know. “No, forget that I asked. I don’t want to know.”

“That’s good, then,” Anna Reilly had said. “It would be a terrible shame to be here in the Eternal City with your lovely wife and continually be thinking of Tess Power, wouldn’t it?”

Yes, he’d thought, but he didn’t say it. Instead, he’d given a magnificent speech at the wedding lunch, talking about the wonderful times he and Riach had growing up in Avalon, omitting to mention their father’s drinking and his devotion to the bookmakers, and leaving out the friendship both brothers had had with the Power family. Wedding speeches were as much about what you left out as what you put in, he realized.

Rhona had loved the wedding feast at the elegant palazzo. She hadn’t been born into money, any more than he had, but she enjoyed spending it. He worked out that her Gucci outfit probably cost as much as the bride’s wedding dress—probably a lot more, if he knew Charlotte—but then he had the money to indulge Rhona. And indulge her he did. Spending
money on her was easy, easier than making their marriage work.

“Isn’t it divine?” she said to him, as they circled the dance floor, her head resting lazily on his shoulder.

“Yes, it is,” he said automatically, wondering what was wrong with him, why wasn’t he happy?

By the time they got divorced, the writing had been on the wall for years. Both of them had gone out of their way to avoid being together until, finally, there was no pretending any more: it was over. Cashel signed the divorce papers feeling like a failure—not something he encountered much in his professional life.

“Are you coming?” Charlotte asked him.

His sister-in-law put her hand on his sleeve and the touch unmanned him. Cashel felt the tears burn up behind his eyes. Here in Avalon he felt like the loneliest man in the world.