Two Fridays in April (36 page)

Despite things having thawed somewhat between them, asking Isobel to become involved with the shop hadn’t appealed initially to Daphne. Such a big step – were they ready for it?

It’s not as if you’d be there with her all the time
, Mo pointed out.
You’d hardly have anything to do with her really. And we’d be keeping the business in the family, which would be good
. Whatever way you looked at it, the idea did seem to make sense – so Daphne put her reservations aside.

A craft shop
, she told her mother the following night. It was a week before Isobel’s birthday: hard to believe she was going to be sixty.
Knick-knacks, bits and pieces for the home, jewellery, knitwear, gift ideas, that sort of thing. Everything Irish, everything designed and produced here. Would you be interested?

Her question was met with silence. Isobel, it would seem, wasn’t interested in a new job, didn’t fancy being under compliment to Daphne. She was working out how to say no.

You’re opening a shop?
she asked eventually.

Well, not me personally – I’m going to keep on working at Donnelly’s, but we’re using the compensation money to set it up, and Mo will handle the accounts. Una wants to work there on Saturdays until she—

And you want
me
to be involved?

Well, Mo thought you might be interested, yes
.

You’re asking me to work there? You’re offering me a job?

Only if you’re interes—

I am
, Isobel said.
I will. I’d love it. Thank you. I’d absolutely love it. Thank you
.

And that was that: they had their assistant.

But Mo was wrong in thinking that mother and daughter wouldn’t have much to do with one another. On the contrary, Isobel and Daphne were thrown together a lot more. They had to be: everyone had to pitch in to get the place ready. And
Isobel did as much as anyone else, helping to source products, using her many contacts to spread the word, doing her bit when it came to painting and decorating. Truth be told, she made herself pretty useful.

And little by little, she and Daphne are unpicking the past, filling in the blanks.

I worked there Monday to Friday
, Isobel told her.
The cinema we used to go to every fortnight, remember? My job was behind the ticket desk. Terribly boring, but it was all I could get
.

I lived in a small flat
, she told Daphne,
above a shoe-repair and key-cutting shop. The noise of those machines they used, the screech of them, was worse than a roomful of wildcats. I had one bedroom, and a kitchen-cum-sitting room. Miserable little place, tiny bathroom. Glorified bedsit, really, but it was cheap, and I could walk everywhere
.

They haven’t discussed the intimacies. There’s been no mention of how Isobel regards her two failed marriages, no talk of Con Pierce the dentist, or Isobel’s abrupt departure from her family.

And in her turn Daphne hasn’t talked about Tom, how he’s helping her to be happy again. She and Isobel simply haven’t reached that place yet.

But once, almost at the end of a lunchtime conversation, Isobel said,
I loved them, you know, those Saturday afternoons we spent together. I’d look forward to them so much
– and Daphne felt a sting of remorse as she recalled her dread of those same encounters, her endurance of whatever activities Isobel had lined up, her relief when the arrangement finally petered out.

They have a long way to go, a lot of making up to do. She thinks they’ll manage it. She hopes they’ll manage it.

Getting the craft shop off the ground wasn’t all plain sailing. One promising supplier declared himself bankrupt, leaving them little time to find an alternative. Another dropped them with scant warning when a bigger customer came along. Road works on the street outside caused damage to a water pipe that created havoc for deliveries for more than a week.

And at the beginning of November, six weeks before the shop was due to open, the inevitable happened, and a new grave was dug in the cemetery. Poor Leo, at peace finally after his years of what must have been bewildered isolation. Mo, of course, was thrown into fresh mourning, which she battled with her customary vigour, still continuing with her shifts at the charity shop, still turning up afterwards at the work-in-progress that was the craft shop to tut over invoices and complain about redecorating costs.

But eventually things had come together, and as the grand opening approached, Daphne found herself wondering how Isobel and Mo would get along once the business was up and running. So different, the two of them, and Mo’s legendary sharp tongue a challenge for any co-worker. But to her relief the two women trucked along, seeming to get on fine – or if they didn’t, they weren’t sharing it with their financial backer.

Using the compensation money to fund the new business made perfect sense, of course it did.
It’s what Finn would have wanted
, Mo had insisted, back when they were still tossing the idea around, back when Daphne was still so unsure about the whole idea.
He’d have loved to see the shop open again, and his family still running it
– and eventually, when Mo was joined in her
corner by Una, who had jumped at the thought of the shop reopening, Daphne gave in.

It had sat restlessly with her for a while, the fact that she was making use of the money she’d sworn never to touch. But seeing the closed-down shop slowly brought back to life, and the enthusiasm with which Una threw herself into the project, she had to acknowledge that Mo was right. It’s what he would have wanted.

And after four months, despite everything, the shop is still there, still trading every day between the hours of nine thirty and five thirty – and, according to the accountant they had to call in to replace Mo, they ended last month in profit for the first time. A small profit, admittedly, but a milestone nonetheless. They’re going in the right direction.

The name was Una’s idea.
Dad’s bicycle was blue
, she said, so The Blue Bicycle it became, even though bicycles are one of the few things they don’t sell. But they’re all agreed that it, and its accompanying logo of a bright blue penny-farthing – another of Una’s creations – lend the place an appealing quirkiness.

So much has changed in a year. Not all of it for the better, of course – there was Leo, and then there was Mo – but on the whole it’s treated them more gently than the one that went before. Time is marching on as it always did, but these days, most of the time, Daphne manages to march along with it, and to regard whatever may lie ahead with more hope than dread.

When she gets to work she finds birthday cards waiting on her desk from Mr Donnelly and Joanna. William, typically, is on the road, chasing up business somewhere beyond the city. The
estate agency continues to putter along, each month bringing its share of fresh successes and disappointments.

At eleven Daphne leaves the office and travels across town to show a first-floor apartment to an elderly widow whose family home has become too large for her to manage. ‘It’s just the garden,’ she says, following Daphne listlessly through the clutch of rooms, looking without enthusiasm at the tiny balcony. ‘I don’t mind giving up the house, it was always a bit draughty, but I’ll miss the garden so much’ – and Daphne, who has already shown the woman’s house and its beautifully tended grounds to three interested parties, closes the file on the apartment and tells her about Mrs Clohessy’s little cottage up the road from her, complete with small, neat back garden, that’s about to be sold privately by the family. If Mr Donnelly heard her …

She locks up the apartment and bids farewell to the widow and drives through the city to a familiar narrow street, lined on each side with redbrick terraced homes, each differently coloured front door leading directly onto the path. She pulls up outside number five and sits for a minute, listening to the soft ticking of the cooling engine as she looks out the house where Mo lived until six weeks ago.

She recalls the first time Finn took her there, a couple of months after they’d begun seeing one another. She’d met Mo just once before, the day she’d delivered the apology lemon cake to the bicycle shop, and the memory of the older woman’s frosty reception on that occasion had made her approach their second encounter with more than a little wariness.

Don’t mind if she’s a bit cool
, Finn said.
It’s just her way, she won’t mean anything by it
– but Daphne still prickled with anxiety.

With just cause, as it turned out: all through the forty-five-minute visit, during which Mo served a pot of dark brown tea and a plate of ginger nut biscuits in her little sitting room, Daphne was acutely conscious of a stiffness in her hostess’s manner, a pursed-lips attitude that screamed disapproval of her son’s choice of companion. Finn did his best, bless him, but his sterling efforts to keep the conversation going did little to lessen the tension that kept Daphne on the edge of Mo’s tweedy couch throughout, nibbling the biscuit she’d felt obliged to accept – she wasn’t a fan of ginger – and drinking tea that was much too strong.

In time, things had got better, of course. Daphne had grown accustomed to Mo’s brusque manner: they’d learned to get along after a fashion. They never became close – too different, maybe – but they tolerated one another’s company. On occasion, they even enjoyed it.

And on Finn’s anniversary last year, when she learned of Mo’s miscarriages, Daphne gained a new understanding of and sympathy for the bluntness and lack of warmth that had so often bewildered and hurt her in the past.

Poor Mo, silenced now.

She gets out of the car, standing back to allow a young woman with a buggy to pass by on the path before approaching the front door that Finn had painted the same shade of maroon every second year. Could do with a fresh coat now: maybe Daphne and Una will do it between them some Sunday.

She lets herself in, feeling the cooler air in the deserted little hallway. So empty it feels, so impersonal, without Mo clattering around. She takes off her jacket and makes her way
to the kitchen, where she finds the spray polish and cloth sitting where she’d left them on the worktop after her last visit.

It’s not much, but it’s something. She works her way through the silent house, banishing dust from windowsills and tables, dado rails, shelves and mantelpieces. She wipes the glass fronts of the framed photos – Leo, Finn, Una, Susan, Daphne; the weddings, the birthdays, the Christmases – that pepper the walls of Mo’s bedroom. She kept them close, all the important people in her life.

Daphne pauses at the most recent one, taken by George on the afternoon of the grand opening last December. There they all are, Isobel, Una, Daphne and Mo, grouped underneath the shop sign, arms interlocked. Huddled in coats and scarves and hats – it had been bitterly cold – but all dressed in their finery underneath, all waiting to begin the new adventure.

All over for Mo now, never again to check invoices or tot up outgoings or calculate tax returns. The adventure ended for her the day she collapsed in the back room of the charity shop, six weeks ago tomorrow.
Just finished her tea
, Daphne was told by Martha, one of Mo’s fellow volunteers.
Stood up to go out the back for a smoke, and that was it
.

The last bit was wrong, of course – Mo didn’t smoke. But Daphne said nothing. What did it matter now?

The cemetery, on the way back to the office, is mellow in the late April sunshine, headstones gleaming. ‘Still miss you,’ Daphne tells Finn. ‘Never forget you. Five years ago today, never forget that either. Happiest day of my life – but you know that already.’

She squints upwards, sees a pair of sparrows flit by. It was sunny on the morning of their wedding too, but by the afternoon the rain had arrived, trailing down the hotel windows as they ate their first meal as man and wife. Chicken she had, or maybe fish. Food the last thing on her mind.

She wonders if she’ll marry again, like Finn did. He’d found love a second time too. Maybe it keeps going around, like the random acts of kindness he was so fond of. Maybe if you wait long enough it comes back to you.